Light-Up and Cough-Up

Well, today's the day. Yes, from today a certain section of people in the UK are being mercilessly victimised and forced to live like smelly, parasitic entities from a lower spiritual plane. In other words, today is the day that smokers can no longer smoke in public places. I didn't even know about this until my 10-year-old son told me about it a week or so ago.

There's more to it than that and most of it makes no sense. I haven't even bothered to check-up on it, all I know is that it sounds totally stupid and is all based on whether or not the smoking is taking place in a home or a place of business. If it's a home, it's allowed, which means (and this is a good one) that if your home is also your place of business, you can't smoke in it. Yes, you heard right, you can't smoke in the privacy of your own home. Doesn't even matter if you live alone and have no other workers to contaminate with your revolting vapours, you still can't do it. Like hell you can't. I am seriousy considering starting a home business purely on principle.

Smoking is now banned in pubs, but not in hotels. This is because a pub is a public place, but a hotel is classed as a home. This means, of course, that the hotel bars will fill-up and the hotel owners will increase their profits to the detriment of the pub owners. I may be wrong, but I would say that there is a larger majority of smokers in pubs than there are in the country generally, so there's a fair bit of profit to be lost there. Smokers can go outside pubs to smoke, but they can only smoke in shelters with one side and a roof or something, 'cos if they have three sides (or something) they'll be public places. This presumably also means that if they just have a roof, they're homes. So, all we need to do is knock our walls down and we can work and amoke in our homes to our lungs' content.

And lorry drivers can't smoke in their cabs. Since when was a lorry driver's cab a public place? Bearing in mind that they spend a lot of time sleeping in them, I'd have thought they were more homes than business premises. But of course, they're working in them too, so that explains that. Not very logically, but the entire thing is totally illogical.

The punishment for lighting-up is that the naughty smoker has to pay a £50 fine if they're caught. The council will be employing officers to sneak around looking for errant smokers and I bet every single one of them is one of those evangelical ex-smoking types. You know the sort I mean. The most unfair aspect of it is that the person who owns the premises the smoker is smoking on (such as a pub owner) will be fined £2,500. A slight difference there. I would strongly suggest that no pub owners go to the toilet or anything, just in case the entire pub lights-up in their absence.

I don't want to talk about this anymore, it's boring me silly. Go to this link to read a much funnier and far more informative blog post about this topic. Before I go, though, read the title of this post again, because I think it's rather clever. Cough-up has two meanings, you see. Get it? Good. Have to keep you on your toes.

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