Shisha cafes have not yet caught on in Lewes, so we may be able to cope with the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces better than Sparkbrook or the Edgware Road. But even in monocultural Lewes, the legislation hardly seems designed to add to the gaiety of nations.
I smoked a bit when I was young but never really got the hang of it. Marijuana was certainly quite beyond me. Dropping acid seemed simpler, though the outcomes were rather unpredictable.
My father hated pubs but adored smoking - forty or so Players' Navy Cut (leavened occasionally by Senior Service) a day from leaving school at fourteen until succumbing to lung cancer at the age of seventy. Still, as he always said, you've got to die of something. He accepted his cancer stoically without perhaps attaining the dispassionate understatement achieved by the artist, Rigby Graham, in the Spring 2006 issue of the excellent 'Illustrator' magazine, where he disclosed to the interviewer,'I didn't like having cancer much'.
A survey for the Campaign for Real Ale found that 840,000 people who never go to pubs said that they would go after the ban. Personally, I would have thought the true figure was more likely to be about seventeen. These people will only go to pubs when they have been so changed that, effectively, they are no longer pubs.
The House of Commons that passed this idiotic legislation is just a bunch of priggish Malvolios and, like Sir Toby Belch, we should rally around to pose the question, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous , there shall be no more cakes and ale?'