Thursday 13 October 2011

Drink, smoke, cakes and impulse buys.

Busy at the moment. I've had a request (at last) for a full manuscript of 'Samuel's Girl', the next novel, and it's just as nerve-wracking as last time. They can still turn it down so nothing is guaranteed yet. This arrived last night just as I was most of the way through a brandy bottle. It's sent now so fingers crossed!


Drink is in the news today. MPs are wasting their time and the money they take from us on deciding whether to have special 'unit limits' for binge drinkers. Rather like declaring bag limits for bank robbers, it's all a total waste of time and money.

[Professor Heather] said: ‘In no circumstances should the committee recommend that the guidelines should be increased. ‘That would be inimical to the health of the nation and wrong on the scientific evidence.’ He is also in favour of advising two alcohol-free days a week. 

He can recommend and advise to his Righteous little heart's content. I will ignore him because I will not spend my one and only life living it the way he wants me to. I do not go fighting or spewing and yet my 'unit intake' is enough to make his liver turn purple and crinkle at the edges. I am not the property of this government nor am I the property of any medical Nazi so he can take his recommendations, wrap them in barbed wire and a broken Glenmorangie bottle and ram them sideways into that place the sun does not illuminate. Ideally he should do this while using a rectal camera and post the results on YouTube as a warning to the rest of them.

All this rubbish is based on doublethink and lies and control freakery. Just as with smoking and fat and salt and all the rest of it. Science is dead. All we have now is a vicious, controlling Puritan religion using science as a front.

As Frank has pointed out in his recent posts, the effects of the smoking ban go far beyond the obvious. Like many of his commenters, it's not just that I no longer call in at a cafe or pub for lunch if I go to the town, I no longer bother browsing the shops either. If I have to go to the post office, I go there and go home. No idling in the cafe with a bacon sandwich and a coffee, and no casually looking in shop windows afterwards. It's not only the pubs and cafes and restaurants that feel unwelcoming now. It's the whole town.

Non-smokers probably haven't noticed yet but as alcohol becomes more denormalised, they'll find that the lack of a lunchtime pint means there's no point wandering the shops at lunchtime either.

Then the non-drinkers, once coffee denormalisation gets properly under way, won't bother with their cafes - nor with the shops around those cafes.

Naturally, the anti-smoke, anti-drink, anti-caffeine and anti-fat (bye bye bakeries) groups will insist there is no effect on any business and there can't possibly be an effect on the newsagent, the ornament/model shop, the electronics shop or the charity shop because none of those customers will be missed.

(PDSA- You drove me away with your 'second hand smoke harms pets' crap. I have not been back and won't be. Apple - I own none of your products and never will because you declared the warranty invalid for smokers. I don't care if you backtrack now. Too late).

I used to browse the garden centre and the camera shop. The camera shop is (was?) next to a cafe that did the best bacon rolls around and the garden centre has (had?) its own coffee shop. I haven't been to any of them in well over a year now and haven't even bothered to see if they're still there. I can get camera gear and plants/pots on the Internet.

Books too. The local bookshop closed a couple of years after the ban even though nobody had ever smoked in there and nobody was ever likely to. No connection? Maybe, but it was near a pub, a chip shop and two cafes.

It's not a conscious boycott, it's just that the entire town is so unwelcoming now.

As far as I can see, under Vladimir Cameron's Red Tory Party, it's only going to get a lot worse.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only browsing I do now is on the internet. Since my one little innocent pleasure of reading a newspaper whilst quaffing pints and smoking has been taken from me I just don't bother anymore.
No, I don't need to smoke continiously but now there is no pot of gold at the end of a shopping rainbow I don't see the point so I don't go.

Anonymous said...

I went out for my al-fresco tea and fag break the other day, picked up a copy of the Scotsman from the canteen, as I perused it there was a comment column from Sheila Gilmore, from ASH praising the antipodeans for the plain packaging ban, the usual plucked from the air stats on deaths and cost etc.

Needless to say it I had to consign it the nearest paper recycling facility (skip) on the way back in to reduce the exposure of her bollocks to the rest of my colleagues.

Wonder if she drinks coffee?

Fucking bring it on!

Xopher said...

I also browse the internet.
I make many purchases and get great pleasure from the fact I bypass Government controls with individuals receiving my cash without sluiters (looters in suits) taxing either of us.
It's am international eCar Boot - Unintended consequences yet again.

Anonymous said...

Careful with the coffee.

Are you so sure it's the caffeine you enjoy?

"A 1941 Hitler Youth handbook declared that for young people at least, caffeine was a poison "in every form and in every strength."
Nazi War on Cancer


Basic Chemical Reactions Occurring in the Roasting Process

"The best cup characteristic are produced when the ratio of the degradation of trigonelline to the derivation of Nicotinic Acid remains linear. The control model of this reaction ratio is a time/temperature/energy relationship. The environment temperature (ET) establishes the pyrolysis region for the desired chemical reactions while the energy value (BTU) and system transfer efficiency (STE) determines the rate of reaction propagation and linearity of Nicotinic Acid derivation to degradation of trigonelline"
http://www.sweetmarias.com/roast.carlstaub.html


Coffee
" Niacin is formed during the roasting process, and coffee can contain 10-40mg of niacin per 100g, depending on the extent of roasting, thus making a significant contribution to average intakes of niacin"

From my researches it seems that it's the niacin/nicotinic acid that gives you that bounce and clarity of thought.

If the prohibitionists in the early part of last century have so much as looked at the thing you enjoy, double check the chemistry.


Crossing to the Dark Side briefly - if you have a passion for apple crumble I could suggest that it is not the flavour but the formaldehyde in the apple that really attracts you.

Nonsense of course, but try proving me wrong.

Easy stuff, find the worst thing in a popular substance and use it to condemn people who enjoy it.


Rose

English Pensioner said...

I ordered a new hard drive for my computer from Amazon Sunday evening, it arrived yesterday (Tuesday) midday by Royal Mail. Apart from it being cheaper than our nearest computer shop, the postage costs were less than that of about half a gallon of fuel and the parking charges. So I'm being very green, which must please someone!

Has anyone noticed - the credit card statement for Amazon is Amazon LU. I assume that VAT is less there, and VAT paid items can be moved freely arround the EU.

petem130 said...

I'm no scientist but I do wonder how scientists have allowed science to be hijacked by such a useless group of no marks?

The one major disgrace in all of this is that the politicians and their advisers seem to have not the slightest clue about cause and effect. They enact on cause but don't actually properly measure the effects never mind the following causes and effects.

No doubt it will take more business failures and failed strategies before the worm turns as it were.

Good luck with the book!

Ed P said...

I asked a guy in the pub last night what he was inhaling from the E-cig-like thing he had. It was some cigarette-flavoured device with no nicotine in it. I recommended E-cigs, but he was "trying to give up" so he would not have to stand outside through the winter. What irritated was his assertion that cigarettes are very harmful and the indoor smoking ban was a good idea!
Now I believe what you've been saying about drones who believe all this nonsense put out by the Righteous (and he seemed an intelligent bloke until the propaganda came dribbling out).

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

It's frightening how indoctrinated we've all become, without even being aware of it. A nurse friend of mine trots it out word for word, straight from training manuals. I can't blame her, she's just on the same bilderburger socialist indoctrination program as the rest of us.

I was at the till in the supermarket the other day. I waited like a good little cleaner until I was given instructions as to what to do, like I haven't done it a zillion times before. Arghhhhhhhh.....I've become a bilderburger socialist drone. Just like they wanted me to.

I must await my pat on the head.

SBC said...

"It's not a conscious boycott, it's just that the entire town is so unwelcoming now. "

I could use phrases other than 'unwelcoming' to describe the crowds of freezing drunken 'boisterous' smokers outside every pub in our town.

Since the smoking ban I wouldn't let any woman I cared about walk through town of an evening alone.

Being a sea-cide 'resort' town (ie one resorts to come here to die) The Bestes Frau In The World and I like to 'promenade' of a 'summer' -two days in August- evening....in an after dinner sort of unashamed way.

More than once I have been forced to draw myself to my full six foot and remonstrate politely, yet firmly, with such groups of smokers and remind them that their behaviour is not becoming to a gentleman of the realm.

Leg-iron said...

SBC - you mean objectionable drunks who happen to be smokers, rather than 'smokers'. I do not harass passers-by and neither do most smokers. In fact, most smokers have abandoned the pubs, clubs and cafes who don't want our business and who have been delighted to close down.

The drunks used to be safely babbling to themselves indoors before the ban. The only reason they're in your way is that the government put them there.

It works both ways too. Increasing numbers of those forced outside are being mugged, beaten and killed.

But hey, they're only smokers. It's not as if they're an important species, like rats.

SBC said...

@ Leggy

Rereading my comment in the cold grey light of a Norfuck winter morning it does read as if I was in someway anti-smoking.

As a 40+ a day man and himself a former drunk-a nasty drunk- nothing could be further from the truth.

I was just pointing out one of the many 'unintended consequences' of the Smoking Verbot.

" SBC - you mean objectionable drunks who happen to be smokers, rather than 'smokers'"

Nope they are outside because they are smokers-or people who want to continue a conversation with a smoker- not because they are drunks.

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