Mike Richards
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Cough up - it might be a gold watch!
posted Monday, 2 July 2007
Typical! The day I decide to take up a pipe (you can’t beat sucking on an old churchwarden) a national smoking ban in England has stopped me in my rolled-up-pieces-of-old-shag stride and I will now have to seek out a new hobby which is both anti-social but involves gripping the end of something hot and makes the ceiling go all yellow.I have passed offices today with wreaths made out of old boxes of Embassy and Player’s No 6, hung on the railings outside offices where smoking areas used to be.No longer will I be able to pass offices where people are flicking cards (depicting the likes of Don Bradman and Dennis Compton) up against the walls, no more the smell of people getting on the train smelling like they’d replaced their comforting bottle of Radox with sixty capstan Full Strength. Sadly the phrase “Laugh? I nearly passed me fags round” will become extinct. This might be replaced with “Laugh? I nearly passed me nicotine-replacement patch round” Hasn’t got the same ring, has it?As a child we were too poor to have a telly. Instead my Auntie Vera – she was sponsored by Embassy before they entered the world of snooker – would entertain me and allow me to count her coupons. She smoked like a trooper and a consequence of which she accumulated a great deal of vouchers which could be transferred into gifts. “You can never have enough sheets” she would say. Sadly, she shuffled off this mortal coil before she could redeem them. I did buy one single sheet for her when she died, took it to Turin on holiday one year and haven’t seen it since.My Auntie Vera couldn’t have been the son of God. She could have been Madonna, though as she liked belting out a good tune.
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