Party poopers
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Our old friend Bob Shields reports that the war on tobacco has claimed another victim - the Casino Bar at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. "Many a Daily Record adventure or Tartan Army trip began and ended with a beer and smoke at this friendly wee watering hole. But not any more," he writes HERE.
A few weeks ago I described how Bob once joined a Forest jaunt to Paris. It was No Smoking Day and we had decided that the best response was to escape to what was then the European capital of smoking. Bob agreed, and wrote a very funny piece about the trip.
The next year we gave him our prestigious (!) Smoker-Friendly Journalist of the Year Award. The awards were presented at a party - attended by 300 people - at Little Havana, just off Leicester Square. (The party is described, very eloquently, HERE.)
Bob turned up in person to collect his prize - a substantial cigar lighter that looked just like a World War II hand grenade. Unfortunately, when he arrived at Heathrow to fly back to Glasgow, his "award" was confiscated by eagle-eyed officials who gave him a good dressing down and demanded to know what he was doing with such a thing in his hand luggage!
PS. I have just Googled the words "cigar lighter, hand grenade" and discovered THIS story from 2003, three years after Bob's little incident.
People
Reader Comments (1)
The author falls back on the usual cliche of saying:
"Yes, smoking stinks. But so does this blatant mix of discrimination and profiteering."
Whether smoking stinks or not is a matter of opinion not fact, as many people like the smell. (I particularly like the smell of some cigars for example.) Moreover, in 1947, the majority of the popuulation surveyed, including non-smokers, professed to like the smell of tobacco as it was fashionable to do so then.
However, the cliche about smoking stinking is one that even ardent smokers sometimes utter and I suspect it is to no small extent the result of anti-smoker propaganda.
We humans are smelly creatures anyway and we secreate and excreate. It also might be worth thinking about the fact that many human activities are smelly. Eating is a good example. Aside from the fact that there are many foods that certain people may object to the smell of: curry, garlic etc; nevertheless, whilst any food may look great of the plate, and taste yummy going down, it all ends up as pooh. So how stinky can you get?