Picture this
Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 10:02 
Digging through some old files at the weekend I found a bunch of Forest-related photographs circa 1999-2002.
This is my favourite. It was taken on board a Eurostar train heading for Paris on No Smoking Day 1999. We were escaping the UK for what was then the unofficial European capital of smoking.
I wasn't on the train because I stayed in London to handle media calls but the photo features two former colleagues – Juliette Torres (standing/smoking) and, seated on the left of the picture, Jenny Starkey, who left Forest the following year to work for Theresa May (and still does!).
Juliette appears in several photos, including the one below that was taken at our old office in Palace Street, Victoria, where smoking was not just allowed, it was almost compulsory.
Other pictures in the collection were taken at Forest events at the Groucho Club in Soho, Little Havana (a nightclub off Leicester Square), Simpson’s-in-the-Strand and Antony Worrall Thompson's restaurant in Notting Hill.
Another supporter, the late great Auberon Waugh also features. He's pictured below at a Forest-sponsored soiree at the Academy Club (which he founded) in Soho.
It sounds posh but the Academy Club was actually a small, dingy room (with a tiny bar) at the top of a rickety flight of stairs in a Dickensian building in Lexington Street, next door to the Literary Review, which Waugh edited.
We had some grand nights that sadly came to an end when Waugh died.
Funnily enough, one of the people I met at the Academy Club was Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas (no relation). Claire went on to become an enormous friend of Forest and can seen (in the red jumper) in the group photo we took following a 'smoker-friendly fry-up' at Simpson's-in-the-Strand on No Smoking Day 2000.
Anyway, there are many more photographs than the ones published here. I'm tempted to do something with them, if only to mark Forest's 40th anniversary in 2019.
Reader Comments (5)
Sorry Simon but I call 'shenanigans'! According to scientific,medical FACT you, as a non smoker, standing outside surrounded by S M O K E R S means you would have been dead before the first fag butt hit the ground (or ashtray, as I'm sure you were all brought up properly). So either that last photo was 'shopped or you give new meaning to the term 'ghost writer'.
Beside seeing people smoking indoors, it's refreshing to see the cigarette packs without any medical porn on it. We've regressed a lot since then.
It's nice to look back at a time before rampant antismoker persecution took hold. It was normal to smoke indoors and out and should be again.
Now the Journal is weighing in on the outdoor smoking issue. While they make no overt support for the ban, they cite a poll they conducted with Claire Byrne Live. Now I recall a poll on their site a few days ago with the same results they present in this article. That suggests their poll was far from an unbiased, random sample.
So while the internet poll may be supportive of a ban, they results are flawed and biased. Either the Journal is ignorant of proper sampling methodology or is unethically trying to stack the deck. It would be nice to see Forest Ireland address this growing sentiment for outdoor bans.
Regarding the Journal outdoor smoking ban poll in Ireland see: "Poll shows support for ban on smoking outdoors near food" http://www.thejournal.ie/smoking-outdoors-3866474-Feb2018/ This article presents the results of what appears to be an Internet poll ignoring all standard sampling methodologies to support an outdoor smoking ban.