Stories which caught my eye today
First of all, this whole smoking thing. There’s been yet more talk of having a ban on smoking in public places, and usual some people are up in arms about it. I say go ahead and do it. I’m quite sympathetic to the idea Brian Sewell put forward in the Standard a while back, which is to ban it altogether – although I’m sure that couldn’t be done in the short term. But tobacco is not like alcohol or drugs, because the two reasons people do drink and drugs don’t apply to tobacco. You can’t get high, and it smells and tastes bad. Yes, when they banned alcohol in the USA, it led to the organised crime explosion as people made their own, but I can’t believe people would go anything like that far to get hold of bootleg tobacco for the reasons I just explained.
People who oppose banning smoking in public places talk about civil liberties as if being inconsiderate to people around you is a right. I don’t want to eat in a restaurant where people can blow tobacco fumes over my food, thank you very much. Nor do I want to drink coffee in a smoky room. I can remember going to aunts’ and uncles’ houses where people smoked, as they didn’t in ours (my mum gave up smoking while expecting me), and how I disliked the smell, which was probably a good thing for me because it made me anti-smoking for life. These days, nobody in our family smokes indoors, even in their own homes. It makes being there so much more pleasant. (Then again, I don’t think they should just get rid of smoking carriages on long-distance trains – people are on those sometimes for six or eight hours on long journeys.)
Earlier I heard the news that Ken’s “consultation” mailshots are going missing because people assume they are junk mail, because they are commonly addressed to “The Occupier”, as junk mail often is. I suspect that another reason is that the consultations fall into the hands of stupid and illiterate people who cannot be relied on to get mail to the right street. We keep getting mail for addresses other than our own – the other day we got a package for a woman at the same number in a neighbouring street, which bears no resemblance whatever to ours! Nobody with any local knowledge could confuse the two streets – one is a six-lane highway and the other is a quiet residential street. Nobody seems able to get it into Ken’s thick skull that extending the charged area into Kensington and Chelsea is a thoroughly stupid idea – most of that area (like most of the charged area south of the river) is just not central London. Worse, the main routes out west, like the A4, go straight through it. It’ll cause huge jams along the “excluded road” from Vauxhall to Marylebone and along the Grosvenor Road / West Cross Route. The whole idea, of course, is to force people off the road and onto public transport, but you simply can’t transport large amounts of goods by bus!
Nobody out in London today could have missed those Evening Standard banners telling us that there was now a scan which could tell when a woman was faking an orgasm. I immediately wondered when they are supposed to do this scan – during the event or after it? It would rather ruin the occasion if a woman was required to wear some sort of monitoring device just so that the husband could see whether she really did enjoy it or was merely compensating for his inadequacies. It turns out that the scans have all been done in labs, and it has been discovered that, among other things, both men and women prefer it with their feet warm. With socks on, if necessary. So that’s what they mean by getting cold feet. The Times has the whole story.
It seems like feminine is back in fashion for ladies right now – all the girls seem to be wearing these “gypsy skirts”, and I arrived at my aunt’s house yesterday evening (to see my new second cousin Isobel) to find my mum in a long dress for the first time in I don’t know how long. I think some women have forgotten how nice they look when they dress like women – with the older generation the trend has been towards dull and unfeminine, and with the younger women, towards the rather too revealing. But even when long and flowing is in fashion, people find ways to put their bits on display. Last night, I noticed a lady in her 40s with her husband, wearing this long white thing which she no doubt presumed was a dress. It was, however, bordering on transparent, and it was obvious that she had nothing on underneath. It is just the sort of thing some women might wear at home when it is just her and her husband and nobody else around. If you’re going to be walking across Hungerford Bridge on a summer’s evening … hold it up to the light before you wear it on its own.
Oh, and one more thing. How many people out there have gone through Peckham Rye train station and got an extremely unhelpful reaction when asking simple questions of the ticket office staff? Yesterday, two of their four platforms were closed, on the line out of Victoria to Kent, but when the train pulled in for Victoria on the South London line, it just sat on the platform. Then, the train on the same line to London Bridge was put back, and then the screen simply said “delayed”, and other trains were cancelled. So I went to ask the staff why the trains were being held up, and I could never get a straight answer – they initially seemed to think “held up” meant hijacked, and then when I told them I meant the trains were “delayed”, they insisted they weren’t. I ended up shouting at the men and telling them not to be stupid, then leaving the station and getting the bus. The guy was Afro-Carribean and had prominent gold jewellery. Anyone else had trouble with this jobsworth?
