Smoking Leads To Strange Conversation

For some inexplicable reason, my wife managed to lure me out of my arse-crevice on the sofa last night. I was quite happy, sat watching the brand new series of 24 in oh-so-sexy HD. The cat was on my lap. My ash-tray was within non-cat-disturbing distance, and I had a coffee to hand. The first episode aired and, as is normally the case, it was simply setting things up for the excitement to come. For reasons I know not, wifey then decided we should go to the pub instead of watch the second episode. I don't know why I agreed but I did.

As a smoker, I am forced to smoke outside. This is not a bad thing. I like enjoying myself in environments that are smoke free. I have got used to it, I accept it, and I appreciate eating my steaks and drinking my lager without the stench of tobacco haunting the room. For a long time, I even claimed that the very act of smoking on the front step of your local was a social event. Everyone talks to each other, even if it is just to moan about the fact that they have to stand outside to have a fag.

However, somewhere along the line, people stopped complaining about this. Enough time has elapsed, and people have accepted it. So now I find myself, on a cold Sunday evening, sharing a doorway with a group of people that have long since stopped whinging about smoking outside, and have other things to say. Unfortunately, the other things they have to say are beyond dull.

One gentleman asked where I was from, which is an honest enough question, but the answer of "round the corner" didn't make sense to him. There next followed a potted family history explaining why I came to be living where I am living. I don't know why I told him this. I wish I hadn't. The subject then switched over to family trees; the art of digging through the crap of your families past and seeing how many of your ancestors died of dysentery, or had their hands amputated in cotton mills. This north-eastern gentleman informed me of how an unknown half-brother had contacted him. This half-brother was doing a family tree of his own, and had found a whole new side to the family. So they met up. Apparently, the mysterious brother looked exactly like their shared father, my smoking cohort informed me. Then he informed me again. I had finished my cig by this point. So he told me again.

"He looked more like my father than my and my brother did. Combined!"

And then he told me again. I couldn't get away. In the meantime, my beer was getting warm and flat, and the karaoke fellow was wondering why I wasn't answering his calls to sing some Robbie Williams.

A later trip to the smoking step saw my accomplice take the form of a late-twenties, pissed as a fart woman. Within the space of a fag, she had informed me that she works in Health & Safety for a building firm, that her family moved to town when she was little, that her mother was a heavy drinker, that she has a daughter of 2 years old, that she drinks more now than she did when she was in her teens (a lot more, apparently), that her daughter regards beer as "dirty" and would rather drink orange or warm blackcurrant, and that she fears when her daughter hits her teens and wants to go out drinking herself.

As I stood listening to this woman, unable to get a word in edge-ways, a few thoughts crossed my mind. The main thought was "Does this woman honestly think I care about any of this?". As my ears went into 'on, but not processing' mode, and my head went into automatic nodding, I couldn't help but wonder exactly where us Brit's have cocked up when it comes to drinking. We do nothing but verbally abuse the Europeans, but we seem to be the worst country in Europe when it comes to drinking behaviour. It is common for French children to have a glass of wine with their meals, yet you don't see hordes of French tourists falling out of multiple French bars in Magaluf, spilling the contents of their stomachs onto the streets.

In America, the legal drinking age is 21. Is that any better? We have all seen movies like Animal House, where the college kids get trollied and participate in drunken debauchery. But that is quite contained. They tend to do it in their residences, and don't really bother hitting the local drinking establishments. Because they can't. The drinking age certainly changes the problem into something more manageable, if not eradicate it. But again, when was the last time a bunch of Americans were on the news because of their elibriated antics?

Maybe the true problem when it comes down to it is not the drinking age, not the lack of demystifying alcohol to children, and not the fact that you can buy booze from anywhere at anytime. Maybe the true problem is that we are British. We live in one of the most hated countries in the world. Hell, we even hate ourselves. We are quick to point the finger, and pour scorn and ridicule on other civilizations that do not share our point of view or way of life. A typical British opinion would be, for example:

"Belgians like to have pipe-smoking competitions? MWA-HA-HA-HA! Sad Bastards."

What is wrong with that? These people can enjoy a smoke and not have to worry about meaningless crap conversation with drunken idiots. Sounds genius to me.

So I have decided, at the earliest given opportunity, I will cease to be a smoker. I know this will be hard, but I'm looking at the benefits. Sure, I won't wake in the morning, coughing and spluttering into life, feeling like shit, but still reaching for a fag. Yes, it will do wonders for my health, and food will taste better. But more importantly than that, the amount of crap I have to listen to whilst standing on cold doorsteps will decrease dramatically.