The latest edition of Boisdale Life is available now.
Published by Boisdale Restaurants, the magazine is said to have a readership of 400,000 "free thinking individuals".
The new issue was due to include an article I was asked to write about the tenth anniversary of the smoking ban.
Curiously it didn't run ("We had too much copy") but I wonder if this passage had anything to do with it:
Today younger generations are conditioned to believe that before the ban every pub and bar was a fug of toxic smoke that suffocated customers and staff without mercy. As a lifelong non-smoker and a regular pub goer for many years I can honestly remember only one occasion when I entered a pub and it was so smoky my eyes watered. Come the new millennium many bars had installed extremely effective air filtration systems so the smoky environments of old were increasingly rare.
Almost as nauseating is the smug claim that “I no longer stink or have to wash my clothes when I return from the pub.” Did no-one wash their clothes before the smoking ban? Did no-one ever sweat or get their clothes dirty in other ways? Was it the norm, before the smoking ban, to wear the same shirt or blouse day after day? I never recall this being a problem until a handful of anti-smoking zealots began to make an issue of it.
Even contributors to Boisdale Life have bought into this myth. At a lunch to mark the magazine’s fifth birthday earlier this year I was disappointed to find little support for amending the legislation. Interestingly that puts them at odds with the general public because even in recent years polls have consistently found a small majority in favour of allowing well-ventilated smoking rooms in pubs and clubs.
Frankly I sensed something that dare not speak its name – snobbery. At Boisdale it’s not enough to have a terrace where people can smoke. It has to be called a ‘Cigar Terrace’. I imagine it’s designed to appeal to a certain demographic that considers cigarettes to be a bit vulgar or second rate. The irony is that the impact of the smoking ban has arguably been worse for cigar smokers. If you want to smoke a cigarette you nip outside for five or ten minutes. It’s not ideal, especially in bad weather, but millions have adapted, albeit grudgingly, to the enforced change. A cigar, like a fine wine, needs to be enjoyed at a more leisurely pace, hence the attraction of Boisdale’s warm and comfortable smoking areas.
Annoyingly a similar thing happened last year when my colleague Rob Lyons, former deputy editor of Spiked, also submitted a piece at the magazine's request. That didn't run either.
Today the editor attempted to placate me by saying, "The good news is we want to make a bigger feature of the anniversary in the next magazine."
The next magazine? At the rate Boisdale Life is published (the previous issue appeared in May, the one before than in December), the next edition won't be published before the new year. Why would anyone feature the tenth anniversary of the smoking ban six months after the event?
To be honest, I don't care about the article not appearing. What I care about is being messed around. Can you tell?