I went to a dinner party the other night. Of course, I'd always rather be down the pub, but it was great fun and lively company nevertheless.
The curious thing about it, though – which would not have been so curious a few years ago – was that seven of the eight people around the table were serious smokers, smoking seriously.
The non-smoker was me. It's a role I've played on many occasions in the past, really ever since I started working on newspapers at the age of 19. I must have been the only hack I knew who didn't smoke. The office must have been in a constant fog. But it didn't bother me. I thought smokers were more interesting people.
It was the same down the pub. Smoking was a necessary part of drinking. Occasionally someone would remark, as we sat there with streaming eyes, that it was unusually smoky tonight, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Some mornings I woke up with a smoke hangover, usually confusingly mingled with a drink hangover but sometimes, when I knew I hadn't had that much to drink, on its own. My clothes, too, reeked of stale smoke which, in Proustian moments, took me back to my grandmother's coats. She was always in the pub and they always smelled of smoke, even though she was a non-smoker.
I had that a bit after the dinner party. A second-hand smoker's cough and a jumper I chucked straight in the washing machine. Nothing too terrible. But it reminded me that I'm personally quite pleased about the smoking ban.
Professionally I've been more ambivalent. It's got nothing to do with ‘individual freedom'. That, in my view, is a nonsensical notion. We are social beings to the root. In what sense can we behave as individuals? But I worried for the old boys who went to the pub for a bit of warmth and society, and the enjoyment of a fag with their half of mild.
I supported the idea that pubs might, by installing efficient ventilation and air-cleaning kit, ‘remove the smoke – not the smoker' as the slogan went. But over a number of years, as the pub trade fought a rearguard action against legislation, it became clear to me that the world was changing and that people – smokers and non-smokers alike – were ready for a ban.
And so it's proved. The smoking ban, it's true, was the last nail in the coffin for some pubs but the vast majority, and their customers, have adapted to the new circumstances.
Has it made pubs better places? I'm afraid you have to say it has.
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