No Smoking Day – time to stub it out
It's No Smoking Day (yawn).
This used to be the busiest day, media wise, in the Forest year. In those pre-Internet years the work would begin weeks in advance with media packs being prepared and posted to journalists and broadcasters throughout the country.
Our message was simple: we had no objection to the concept of No Smoking Day (one day in the year when people who wish to quit can focus on that objective) but we objected to the fact that companies and organisations were being encouraged to use NSD as a platform for some cheap publicity, usually in the guise of smoking bans or other anti-smoking initiatives that targeted all smokers, not just those who wanted to cut down or quit.
When I began working for Forest I had the idea of organising a No Smoking Day stunt that would offer some light relief from all the stop smoking hyperbole.
I decided it was best if we left the country on No Smoking Day and so we organised an away day to Paris, the "European capital of smoking" (as it was then), where we met our French counterparts who hosted lunch in a restaurant formally used by the Resistance during the war.
The group went via Eurostar, which still had smoking coaches in 1999, and the trip was given a double page spread in one newspaper which sent its main feature writer and a photographer. Happy days!
The next year we organised a smoker-friendly breakfast fry-up at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, the famous London restaurant. (In those days you could still smoke and eat in British restaurants. I had this experience in Vienna last year and it felt hugely civilised and oddly liberating. I can't wait to go back.)
Tom Utley, then writing for the Telegraph, was one of our guests at that breakfast. Tom was, and is, a long-standing friend of Forest. Now working for the Daily Mail, he was also a guest at the Hands Off Our Packs reception last month. The London Evening Standard was represented too and published a suitably tongue-in-cheek report, if I remember.
Today every day is no smoking day and so the event that bears that name has lost much of whatever it was that appealed to the national media. It's still a media 'event' at local level ('Smokers in South Tyneside are being encouraged to kick the habit tomorrow on No Smoking Day' etc etc), which is why I'm doing a number of local radio interviews this morning, but it's not what it was.
Time, perhaps, to stub it out.
PS. Woke up this morning to hear Betty McBride of the British Heart Foundation, which now runs No Smoking Day, banging on about shisha pipes on the Today programme.
According to the BHF, an hour on a shisha pipe is the same as smoking 100 cigarettes. At least presenter Evan Davies, who admitted having smoked a shisha pipe himself, had the good grace to sound incredulous.
Now, I'm no expert, but when I was given a guided tour of the shisha bars in London's Edgware Road some years ago I was told that tobacco represents about 20 per cent of what you actually smoke in a shisha pipe – the rest is fruit peel.
There was no mention either of the sociable nature of shisha bars which don't serve alcohol but attract young and old alike.
So this is what No Smoking Day has come to. Bizarre claims and partisan scare-mongering. Seriously, it really should be put out of its misery.
Reader Comments (14)
I always recognise "National No Smoking Day" in some way or another, and today was no exception.
Every morning I enjoy a mug of coffee, two cigarettes and settle down to watch the daily news. Today I had two mugs of coffee five cigarettes and watched the antics of birds in my garden.
I didn't even know it was 'no smoking' day! Obviously a very successful exercise in wasting effort and money (so what's new?)
The 100 cigarette/hour equivalent is, of course, nonsense. By referencing TC claims that 1 fag shorten life span by about 10 minutes (16 hours lost life per session) the average daily shisha smoker wouldn't make it to 40.
I think we should have a "No telling lies day"
At least it might shut ASH up for 24 hours!
"TC claims that 1 fag shorten life span by about 10 minutes"
I should have died years ago!
If you have the time, report the BHF to the Charity Commission. They get away with false claims because nobody objects.
As I have already said on another blog, I will 'celebrate' today by smoking twice as much as usual and as publicly as possible.
However, as you have said Simon, it is hardly what it was, so a lot of the fun has gone out of that idea.
Like FrankJ, I wasn't aware either that it was No Smoking Day, until I saw DP's blog and then, as he didn't mention NSD, just alluded to it, I double checked it online!
Do like your idea Peter Thurgood, but I don't expect the rotten, moronic spoil sports at ASH would play ball, do you?
The British Heart Foundation is another charity along with CRUK that donated to Ash to bring about the smoking ban. Another charity I refuse to support.
'I had this experience in Vienna last year and it felt hugely civilised and oddly liberating'
Isnt it amazing that the EU with their hateful Directives who instigated and are responsible for bringing in this viscious Smoking Ban to the rest of Europe, including a mother country like Vienna, are the very ones who end up doing their own thing by having separate indoor smoking area in bars and restaurants.
While the rest of us slaves to the powerful, ie govts of Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales carry out their bidding to the letter of the law.
It makes me so mad I could bite an arse.
Does anyone have any idea who the Patron Saint of Anti-Smoking is ?
There must be one.
Surely ?
Martin
Undoubtedly, King James I of England
"Thus having, as I truste, sufficiently answered the most principall arguments that are used in defence of this vile custome, it rests onely to informe you what sinnes and vanities you commit in the filthie abuse thereof.
First, are you not guiltie of sinnefull and shamefull lust? (for lust may bee as well in any of the senses as in feeling) that although you bee troubled with no disease, but in perfect health, yet can you neither be merry at an Ordinarie, nor lascivious in the Stewes, if you lacke Tobacco to provoke your appetite to any of those sorts of recreation, lusting after it as the children of Israel did in the wildernesse after Quailes?
Secondly it is, as you use or rather abuse it, a branche of the sinne of drunkennesse, which is the roote of all sinnes..."
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/blaste.html
Counterblaste is required reading if you want to know where this all started.
NSD is something I only ever knew about on the day. As a teacher, it was the Head of Art who always handed me a leaflet in the staffroom, on the day. Having been semi retired for a number of years, I only know of NSD when a blog like this one tells me. Isn't it strange that the only people who know about NSD in advance are non smokers.
@Rose2
King James 1 was also known as the "wisest fool in Christendom" too.
Rose -
Good ol' King James I ?
How could he possibly be a candidate ?
The man was a pederast, a thug, a sadist, and a Grand Master in the arts of intolerance - in short, a thoroughgoing Grade A bastard (who had Raleigh judicially murdered).
Oh , I see what you mean.
If only he'd been a Catholic !