Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
Recently I was sitting at a beautiful terrace restaurant on the roof of a building right up in the mountains. You could see half of the world below, and all of the sky above. There was snow on the mountain peaks even though it was hot and dry. It was gorgeous.
And then, as I was tucking in, a smell intruded and interrupted my beautiful thoughts. At the next table, upwind of us, were two Spanish ladies of a certain age, puffing away on their fags while they demolished their lunch. I was enraged.
Sotto voce mutterings
Being British, I did nothing apart from sotto voce mutterings about inconsideration and insensitivity, and waited for them to finish. And then I had one of those weird moments when I remembered that twenty yeas ago that would have been me, inconsiderately polluting the gorgeous atmosphere up there, and I felt ashamed. Not for my current feelings, but for the idiot I used to be when I was younger.
It must be about twenty years ago that I gave up smoking. I still remember how hard it was when I was trying to give up, and how easy it was when I actually did. I used to be a thirty-a-day man, but when I gave up it was gone, and I never missed it. It still seems like a miracle.
It makes perfect sense
I was so puzzled by this that I took up NLP so I could understand how that might be. And now I do, it makes perfect sense. But that’s the subject of a whole other blog, maybe. I have found that almost everyone who has given up smoking hasn’t regretted it, and doesn’t miss it, whereas those who still smoke complain bitterly about the restrictions to their freedom.
We have the same thing happening about speeding. I regularly used to get caught by those dratted speed cameras, and only managed to avoid getting 12 points by the skin of my teeth. Eventually I gave myself a talking-to and forced myself to slow down. I know that this sounds smug, but I have noticed that my journeys don’t seem to take any longer, and I’m considerably less stressed at the wheel. And my licence is clean.
Choose your battlegrounds carefully
I have a friend who hasn’t worked this out, and he’s about to lose his licence. He says he’ll hire a very expensive lawyer to find loopholes for him, and he says he likes to go on public transport, but I think he’s kidding himself.
The truth is that these restrictions are there now, and they’re not going to go away. So we have a simple choice. Either do like Canute and rage against the machine, or just accept it and bend with the wind. We forget that income tax was only introduced to pay for the war against Napoleon. Is that still going on?
I do like to use a long word like fenestration…
We need to be more tactical and choose battlegrounds where we have a chance of winning. There used to be a fenestration tax, so people bricked their windows up. You can still see these odd features on many older houses. I suppose they got used to it or couldn’t be bothered to put the windows back after they got the window tax repealed.
I actually think we’re very lucky to live in the sort of country where the government commissions studies about illness and health and then takes action to help improve the health of the population.
Fewer people smoke, which will lead to less smoking-related illness. Generally people are living longer and healthier lives. I wish the government could find a way to do the same for alcoholism and obesity. There’s already a lot of debate about the difference between illness and self-imposed medical conditions over-taxing the NHS.
Working smarter, exercising smarter
Spain does ban smoking indoors in public places. We just noticed the smoke because we were eating outside, and only an idiot would eat inside when there’s such a lovely view. Perhaps the restaurant manager might have worked smarter, and checked the wind direction, so he could site the smoking tables downwind.
I also noticed that every town and village we passed through had a small public area with basic exercise machines, like a playground for adults. It looked very odd. I have to say that I never saw anyone actually using one, although people did occasionally lean on one while chatting, and having a fag.
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