Tuesday 12 July 2011

Smoking and the Hyperchild.

We didn't have ADHD when I was a kid. We had smokers and lots of them, but anyone displaying signs of ADHD was cured in a very quick way by their parents, their teacher or the local copper.

It was a very effective cure because none of us ended up on long-term medication, or indeed anything beyond Calamine lotion or Kaolin and Morphine (for different, non-ADHD, things) and the ADHD didn't ever come back. Neither did the chicken pox, so that worked too.

Now that smoking is in decline and ADHD symptoms are diagnosed in every child who is capable of exercising for three hours a day, guess what?

Passive smoking causes ADHD.

All those years of medicine, all that work carried out by dedicated scientists, all those expensive surgical techniques, all that pharmacological chemistry, all the biochemistry, all the DNA analyses, all of it has been a total and absolute waste of time.

Smoking causes everything. As smoking declines, all those problems get worse because of the magical homeopathic effect of smoke. The tinier the trace, the deadlier it is. In fact, every time a smoker quits, an innocent little baby dies somewhere. Do you want that on your conscience? I don't.

Smoking causes asthma even though it never actually has. Smoking causes ear infections we naively blamed on bacteria. I expect the bacteria will now sue for defamation and win. Smoking makes your teeth grow inwards and rots your socks. Smoking will make you have children with webbed fingers and an affinity with dungarees and the banjo.

Smoke can pass through four inches of lead shielding and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Smoke can melt your eyeballs and make your nose drop off. Michael Jackson never had surgery. He was a passive smoker. I'm just waiting for that one to spread.

Smoke focuses in on antismokers and follows them home, where it raids the fridge and drinks all the booze while they sleep. A single whiff of smoke will kill you in a month. Talking to a smoker will kill you in a day. Talking about smokers will kill you in an hour and thinking about smoke will kill you in a minute. If you avoid all traces of smoke and never let the thought into your head... you'll die anyway.

When there is just one smoker left, the effects will be magnified to the point where all life on Earth will be extinguished, except the smoker. That is the logical conclusion to the antismoker arguments.

I hereby nominate the Dreadful Arnott for the highest award for comedy available. The absurdities spouted by her, her organisation and her dim drones must have the remaining Monty Python team gasping in admiration. Or is it because there's a cigarette burning fifty miles away?

This latest nonsense is the prelude to banning smoking in the home. That's it. The last indoor place. Your own home. The antismokers will cheer because they are too thick to realise what it means. Aside from the little detail that we will all be outside, in every street, and impossible to avoid.

It means homes will be monitored. Not 'smokers' homes' because we are not a separate species and not identifiable. All homes. ALL homes will be monitored and checked and might well end up with cameras installed. Yes, the bathroom too.

What's that, antismokers? You'd object to being seen naked by strangers? Really?

You don't object to the nudie scanners at airports. Why would you object to this?

It's for your own protection, antismokers. For the cheeeldren. You dare not object. Let's be honest, the one and only thing you object to is smoking. You believe all of the above and you will - yes, you will - accept those cameras in your home. Yes, you will. You are certainly gullible enough. I've met many of you now, in another persona, and the rubbish you will believe is astounding. And, I confess, intensely amusing.

Don't have children so it won't apply to you? Are there children next door, across the street, in the same town? Smoke passes through walls by magical means, that has been established beyond all doubt. The pseudoscience is settled. All homes must be monitored in case someone in there decides to smoke or - Heaven forbid - light a candle. All homes, antismokers.

No objections now, antismokers. You did this. You must accept it.

After all, you didn't like the smell. So this is a perfectly proportionate response. Isn't it?

I've just scrapped another five pages of that dystopia. There's no way to make stuff up faster than ASH. I'm just going to have to go for the utterly absurd and hope they don't get there first. I'm not hopeful.

A while back I mentioned Dick Puddlecote's showdown at the OK Ashtray next Saturday. It's starting to look like Stony Stratford will have a lot to do on Sunday, sweeping up all the corpses and piling the dead children into size-ordered mounds for the Dreadful Arnott to count them all. There is nothing ASH can do because smoke stops bullets and discharges Tazers and causes double vision and elbow cramps in those holding the weapons. No, the Four Smokers of the Fagopalypse cannot be stopped.

Residents of Stony Stratford - flee! Flee for your lives, and your noses! Never return, for there may be a trace of nicotine left on a stone somewhere and that stuff has a half-life of a million years (yes, several have believed that one). Hide your cats and your hamsters because smokers will snack on them when they've finished putting small children on spikes, coughing at your daughters and blowing smoke in the faces of councillors. Can you spot them?

To corrupt a line from Dune - "Know a Smoketab by his yellow-stained fingers". Except... we don't all have them. You will notice that the prematurely aged hands on the warning labels don't even have the stains. So, antismokers, best be scared of everyone, just in case. You never know whether that hand you're shaking, or which is passing you your change, has been tainted with the Evil Stuff Of Death.

And now, ASH, if you would kindly stop pre-empting all my ideas and let me finish this damn book while it is still set in a future further away than next week, I'd appreciate it.

I don't know how they do it. I don't even use voicemail.

6 comments:

Magnetic said...

LI, thanks for highlighting the numerous dangers of secondhand smoke. I have worked tirelessly over the last few years to warn the world of these dangers – you’ve covered many of them.

Currently, I am attempting to at least get filthy smoking banned from outdoor eating areas. LI, you in particular would well identify with these dangers. I hate that these filthy, dangerous, selfish addicts can smoke outside and poison the whole environment. Where smoking is permitted in outdoor eating areas, I have seen birds drop dead; within minutes plants shrivel and wither; the surrounds are reduced to a barren Moonscape. Why should normal people – like me – have to put up with this? I know that some, if not all, of my hair loss is due to secondhand smoke exposure.

I have had many experiences where I have been enjoying a meal outside and selfish, pro-carcinogen smokers decide to light up. Within just minutes – that’s right, just minutes - I have found myself enveloped in a thick cloud of toxic, smelly smoke. I am unable to make out the food dish directly in front of me…… and my sense of taste vanishes. Trying to see the waiter, let alone get his attention for the bill, becomes another ordeal. Smokers are really selfish.

Everywhere should only cater for normal people who don’t smoke – like me. Why should normal people - like me - have to put up with even a whiff of that lethal, toxic smoke produced by the pro-carcinogen addicts? And don’t even get me started on those horrible saliva-dripping, germ and carcinogen-infested cigarette butts that those selfish smokers think they can pollute our planet with and endanger normal people like me.

Did I mention that smokers are selfish? Smokers are selfish!

:)

Anonymous said...

"the Four Smokers of the Fagopalypse"

You owe me a keyboard. I may even have done myself a permanent injury from laughing so hard.


Heretic

PT Barnum said...

Given the hideous dangers of passive smoking which are now being discovered, the only solution is that the entire population are forced to become active smokers, which will only cause cancer, impotence, wrinkles and death.

Bill Sticker said...

You wait until they start saying that smokers have a larger 'carbon footprint' than antismokers.

Re the writing; spooky isn't it? You come up with an idea and it turns up in real life. Almost like some sneaky bleeder has a rootkit on your hard drive and periodically trawls it for promising material.

View from the Solent said...

"Smoke focuses in on antismokers and follows them home, where it raids the fridge and drinks all the booze while they sleep."

Booze in an antismoker's fridge? Is this logical, captain?

Anonymous said...

Some trollers have broken into the comments section in the Mail. But they're back again with another scare story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2013825/Babies-born-smoking-mothers-far-likely-deformed-limbs.html

My mother bore five children, none of them with any deformities (apart from my face). Therefore, any spastics born to non-smoking mothers are spastic because their mothers did not smoke.

I rather doubt that any spastics are reading this, but if you are and you mother didn't smoke, this was her fault, and hers alone. She wanted you to be in that funny chair for all your life. Because she did not like the smell.

Lead author Professor Allan Hackshaw, from University College London, said: 'People may think that few women still smoke when pregnant. But the reality is that, particularly in women under 20, the numbers are still staggeringly high.

That is because they are single fucking mothers, you fool. They are the underclass, more inclined to sink alcopops than folate.

Professor Hacksaw then went on to completely fucking ignore what we all know. The rat children of Bradford, miscegenated offspring of closely-bred cohorts. Rather than deal with the fact that millions of perfectly fit, healthy people were born to smokers throughout the 20th century, Professor Hakenkreutz would prefer to bring home the startling revelation that smoking is EVIL.

And I'll give you £5 for every inch taller than this cock is than I, born to an irresponsible monster of a smoking mother. Does anyone want to take me up on it, and give me a fiver for every inch I have on him?

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