I have now lived in the drab world of the non-smoker for two long and sorry years. I promised myself when I gave up that I would not become one of those dreadful converts, whining about their clothes stinking of cigs after five minutes in the pub (of course your togs don’t smell of the ALE you’ve drunkenly poured down yourself, do they? You could wear them tomorrow if it wasn’t for that cigarette’) If you don’t like a smoky boozer then I’m sure there’s an All Bar One or a Starbucks or a Body Shop to suit your requirements perfectly.
Two years on and I have an update: I’m still pro-smoker. I haven’t lapsed back into smoking and I haven’t gone over to the darkside of the anti-smoke brigade.
The other night, however, I found myself in the glamourous West End of London (well, the Glasshouse Stores). I was appalled to see a publogger stub out her cig butt on the carpet, on the grounds that the ashtray was at least a yard away. That, my friends, is deeply antisocial pub behaviour, it contributes in an entirely negative way to the process of a boozer becoming tatty and it should be frowned upon.
Of course, it hardly compares to the other piece of very bad behaviour I saw recently, in which a piqued punter threw his freshly-bought drink to the floor in protest at some (real or imagined) issue. That he lost his own drink was well-deserved. That some entirely innocent and unconnected bystanders had their stuff drenched with booze was not. Certainly the damp innocents will have had more to worry about than a slight smell of tobacco on the tube home.
The worst thing about this incident was that I had broken my rule about not entering a pub with a bouncer on the door. And the miscreant in question still wasn’t ejected. What use is that?