Writing about the smoking ban

Posted on by June 26, 2017 9

So the tenth anniversary of the UK smoking ban is nearly upon us.

I will be honest and say that it leaves me in a bit of a quandary.

Do I write about it or not?

I could be arming myself to counter all the mythical statistics which are bound to fill the meeja, but Christopher Snowdon has already done that.

I could do my own little bit of nit picking by saying that they claim one in every six deaths is caused by smoking, while I claim that over half of all deaths in Ireland are caused by having blue eyes.  It’s the same logic.  More than one in six smoke, so naturally one in six deaths are smokers, and the same applies to blue eyes.  The Church of Health hasn’t copped onto that one yet?

Or I could harp on about the number of pubs that have closed as a direct result of the ban, but Forest have already covered that.

So here is my quandary – what the fuck is left for me to write about?  Apart from anything else I get the distinct impression that I am preaching to the converted, though I am delighted to say this site gets a lot of people looking for information on smoking [top search term for today – “anti smoking propaganda lies“!].

Maybe I will just mark the occasion by writing about cute little doggies?

Smoking dog[Thanks, Darryl!]

 

Habits

Posted on by June 25, 2017 10

Living as I do in a world free of timetables and clocks, it’s very easy to get into a string of habits.

I do much the same things every day, as each day is more or less equal to the last.  In fact the days are so equal that the only way I know what day of the week it is is by remembering what I did the previous day [I went for the paper yesterday, so today must be Sunday?] or by looking at my watch.  The latter nicely reminds me what date, day and month it is but unfortunately omits the year.

Now I don’t mind habits, nor do I mind routines provided those routines aren’t unpleasant.  They do sometimes lead to problems though.

It has reached the stage where habits and routines have become so commonplace that I do them so automatically that I’m not even aware that I am doing them.  Many’s the time I have got up to make a mug of tea, only to discover a fresh mug on the table beside me.  At some stage I have made a fresh brew without even realising it.  Other times I have discovered I have done the dish washing with only a vague memory of having done so.

A frequent occurrence is to find myself doing something with no clue as to why I am doing it.   Why am I standing in front of an open refrigerator?  I have to think back over the last few minutes to realise that I was making an habitual sandwich and was supposed to be getting the butter.  I didn’t realise I was making a sandwich, but then it’s part of the routine.

The downside of all this is that I have routine and habitual places where I put things.  Money always goes in a particular pocket; car keys are always in the same place and my pipe is always either in my gob or by my chair.  Then the day comes when the car keys get moved to somewhere different and I then can’t find them.  If they are not in Spot X then they must be lost.  The fact that they are in Spot Y which is only a couple of feet away but behind something is irrelevant – they are lost.

I have lost my pipe.  It’s not the end of the world as I have other pipes, but it’s not in my gob and it’s not by my chair, therefore it’s lost.  There is absolutely no point in looking for it as it could be anywhere.  I obviously put it down somewhere but for the life of me, I cannot remember where.

This is the downside of habit and routine – absent mindedness.  Its’ a bugger.  Absent mindedness leads to a break in routine and my whole life gets fucked up because things weren’t done the way they were supposed to be done.

So now I have a new habit which I have developed.

Everywhere I go I scan the are for items that I absent mindedly misplaced.

It’s a bugger.

 

If it aint broke

Posted on by June 23, 2017 10

The garden looks a tad neglected at the moment.

The hedges are the worst offenders but that’s because my hedge cutter is acting the bollox.  I charge up its battery and the fucking thing cuts about ten foot of hedge before running out of charge and giving up the ghost.  Seeing as I have a couple of hundred feet of hedge, that just ain’t gonna work, especially as it takes about nine hours to recharge.

Yesterday I decided it was time the rough grass areas needed a bit of strimming.

“Just gonna head out to strim along the roadside” says I to Herself, “If the fucking strimmer isn’t broken as well, ha ha!”  I like my little jests.

So I took out the strimmer, topped off the petrol tank, primed the carburettor, set the choke, switched on and then gave the starter rope a good sharp pull.

I nearly sprained my wrist.

Yup!  The fucking thing had seized up.

Now this confused me.  Logic dictated that it couldn’t have seized as it was working perfectly last year and I am always careful to use the right petrol mix.  How could it turn from a functioning motor into a block of solid metal?  I decided to take it apart.

The first problem was that the casing was held on with those damned hexagonal screws that are ubiquitous these days.  I found a way of removing them and did so.  Next I had to remove the sparkplug.  This wasn’t so easy as it was recessed so I needed a proper spanner to do the job.  My adjustable wrench wasn’t going to cut it this time.  Also it hadn’t been removed in the twelve or so years since I bought it and I knew it was going to be tricky.

There are a few old wooden boxes lying around the garage and they are full of ironmongery that is so old that they are all rusted into one solid lump.  There are bolts, hinges, nails, screws an spanners and a load of things that have no apparent purpose.  I rooted through them and eventually found a spanner that actually fitted the plug.  It involved removing a deep crust of rust but what the hell.

I removed the plug with the help of some sweat, some leverage and a dose of WD40, and could now see the top of the piston.  I gave it a poke and it moved a fraction of an inch.  It wasn’t seized.  Good news and bad news.  Good news in that I didn’t need a new motor, and bad news that it still wasn’t working.

I don’t know what gave me the idea, but I decided to look at the other end – the business end where there is that bit of plastic string that whistles around and does the jobby.  It was locked solid.  I managed to disassemble it and spent a happy few minutes removing grass that had wound itself around the bearing and was packed as tight as steel.  I had to hack it with a very sharp knife and a screwdriver.  I tried pulling the starter rope again.  The engine turned!

I reassembled everything, refilled the tank and tried again.  It worked perfectly.

I spent a happy half our out on the road strimming the verges and the worst of the overhanging brambles.  I chatted with a couple of neighbours.  A motorist asked for directions to Greystones so I sent him up the mountain to The Bogs.  I inhaled a healthy dose of exhaust fumes and pollen and plastered myself in shards of grass, nettles, dock leaves and a bit of a Christmas tree that someone had dumped in my ditch.  One of my neighbours takes his strimming seriously and wears protective goggles, a fucking hard hat [why the fuck?] and ear protectors but I don’t bother with any of that crap.  The only concession to safety is that I wear a luminous waistcoat and that’s only to scare the shit out of drivers who come speeding around the bend and slam on the brakes, thinking I’m a speed trap.

“What took you so long?” Herself asked when I went back in.

I sighed.  She has no idea of the genius that is her husband.