Skip to main content

Pink Smoke

I almost never go out in bars or clubs, whether on the gay scene or not; probably a partial cause for my lack of social life. One of the reasons for my not patronising these venues, in addition to my lack of interest in drinking and the level of noise in those places, is cigarette smoke. I hate when breahting air becomes as difficult to find as a straight Lib Dem politician in a leadership contest and then to have to bring the memories of that experience at home with me, afterwards.

The recent ban on smoking in public places in England (see what I had to say on the subject of smoking/smokers by following the link) which will take place in the summer of 2007, will probably not make much of a difference with my habits in this respect but it looks like it will for a lot of gay men.
About 53% of gay men smoke, nearly double the 29% of all adult males. While 8,000 gay men have died from Aids to date, one charity estimates 12,000 die every year from smoking-related diseases.
Protect and survive, The Guardian - 11 August 1999
Further more, it seems that most of those smokers are so-called "social smokers"; people who smoke only when encouraged to do so by the people around them in a social environment. It is therefore good to hear that gay venues, gay politicians and even punters, who feel encouraged to finally try and stop smoking, are, on the whole, welcoming the ban.

While the ban will probably not do much for my social life, it will most certainly make a huge difference for the general level of health on the gay scene.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , .
Labels:

Comments

  1. TM2/23/2006 12:36 pm

    I was talking about this to another anti-smoking friend, our argument is the same, but we expect the poor discriminated aginst smokers to carry on anyway as a protest :0(

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

For the Living Left Behind - Frieda Hughes

No one dead who loved you  Would wish your future years dismembered  Against the rocks of their departure.  They would not sentence you to the guilt of betrayal  For any moment they weren’t uppermost in your mind  Nor would they wish you whittled down like a stick  To pick the stony teeth in the open mouth of abject misery,  Daily, until you are nothing left.  No one dead who loved you  Would want your still-breathing carcass  To be lost in the wilderness  That spans the two worlds of the living and the dead,  Where you are neither dead nor living.  They would not applaud your misery,  But would weep to watch their loss  Made pointless by the waste of you.  The dead become a part of us; our skin, our bones, our thinking;  Their existence is continuous in us  And the best we do in everything  As we move on from the moment of their passing.  Step back from the graveside where nothing flower...
Post a Comment
Read more

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte...
4 comments
Read more