smoking ban

This is from the Age's Good Weekend magazine on 9 December 1989, in a kind of 'farewell to the 80s' article called 'Remembrance of things passed' (p. 126+) by Anthony Dennis and David Monaghan. I dug it up because I was having a think about when smoking began to be banned in earnest in public places in Victoria/Australia (ironically, within an hour or so of being interested in this, I saw a headline in today's paper which mentioned a Crown employee suing that organisation as he had contracted lung cancer, he alleges, from working in a part of the casino that allows smoking still). 

I was only reviewing the Age in the 70s and 80s searching on terms like 'smoking ban' and not getting that far, but marvelling at yet another example of the ways in which general attitude appears to have been 'this is how it has always been, people smoke everywhere and that is what we are used to, so there is clearly no way it can ever change'. 

What surprises me I guess is the way that a lot of the reportage is taking the side of smokers eg the piece above. Maybe it's because smokers are so bad tempered, notoriously. I remember complaining to a worker at the Gladstone Park Woolworths that smokers were always getting served ahead of everyone else at the 8 items or less counter and she said it was because they got shitty if they didn't get immediate attention. 

Grand Tour 2011 part two

5 September 2011

Most of this day was spent either flying or getting to places from which to fly or fly further. I can’t really recommend it as a way to spend a day unless you are dead keen to get somewhere. I am writing from Frankfurt Airport. I find it unusual and interesting that I have walked a massive distance after getting off the plane from a 10 hour trip Hong Kong – Frankfurt. It was in one sense a good thing, as my feet were thoroughly swollen from all that sitting. In another sense it was a pain in the arse. But then again if the travel agent had said to me, ‘well, we can get you on a connecting flight but you’ll have to walk quite a way between aircraft and wait three hours on a funny row of seats facing a booth known as a “smoking zone” – so you probably won’t want to do that, will you?’ I’d say don’t be ridiculous it sounds great.

I have watched the following films today: Thor, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, and I think that’s all. There may have been more. I watched the first half hour of The Beaver but by then I was movied out. Thor was one of those films where you’re always waiting for the story to begin then you realise it is well under way and you won’t get much more. Midnight in Paris is dross. Source Code had me reaching back in my mind for the /Filmcast review of it, and in my memory they pointed out the resolution was incredibly illogical and if you thought about it at all you’d say that’s kind of unsatisfying too.

I was lucky enough to have a window seat but unlucky enough for it to be over the wing but fortunately it was really cloudy so I wouldn’t have seen anything anyway. I was also lucky enough to have an empty seat next to me. The passenger in the aisle seat was a friendly woman who seemed to work in China but live in Canada – I’m pretty sure that’s what she said, although maybe as she was Chinese and worked for a Chinese company I just assumed she lived in China. Or perhaps she said she lived in somewhere in China the name of which sounds like Canada, and I was confused. We had a stilted conversation late in the flight.

I can’t believe these smoking zones. They are like big telephone boxes, maybe the size of four conjoined telephone boxes, and people either go in there to stare gloomily out at the passers by while they suck up their cancer smoke or (it seems) sometimes spontaneous conversations develop. Community!