Hamish Champ: The smoking debate goes on. And on.
There's been a lot of debate swirling around my fellow blogger Pete Robinson's piece in the first anniversary of the smoking ban.
I found myself on the receiving end of some flak for a comment I posted on Pete's well-argued musings, with one witty reader suggesting I should have gone to Specsavers for mis-reading his own earlier posting. I love it when an advertising hook becomes part of the zeigeist, don't you? Like, "I'll buy that for a dollar!" No, wait, that's a line from 'Running Man'.
Any road up, it looks like the row over the ban and its impact will continue for some time to come. This will only be heightened by AC Nielsen's findings that 175 million fewer pints of beer were sold since the ban's introduction last July. That's a lotta, lotta pints not being sold.
Many pro-smokers - and a few non-puffing ones too - suggest pubs should have the right to choose whether or not they allow smoking in their establishment. Democracy in action, they say.
It's an interesting argument and I haven't got the time to delve into it in detail at the moment, but one thing did cross my mind: when the ban came in opponents pointed to its many disadvantages, one being that the whole social interaction between punters would be wrecked as smokers disappeared outside to light up.
Life in the pub has certainly changed, I'll grant you that. I was in full flow a while back with a puffing chum, arguing the merits of one Ritchie Blackmore versus the guitar-playing skills of Jimmy Page while also discussing whether our favourite punk band was the Clash or the Buzzcocks, when he ups and leaves me to suck down on a Marlboro Light. Left standing there, I was. Nothing to do with the quality of my argument, I assure you.
But it's something I've gotten used to. And surely if you had smoking and non-smoking pubs the same thing would happen but on a grander scale? You'd have groups of friends going out and dividing along smoke inhalation lines. And how healthy - socially or physiologically - would that be? At least people go to the same pub under the current regime.
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Rising costs - gas, leccy, raw materials, etc - have been cited as a problem for many licensees and brewers recently, but I usually find that until the soaring cost of stuff hits home on a personal level it's difficult to appreciate how hard it's hitting.
I tend never to look at the cost of what I'm buying when I'm sent out on a supermarket trip; I just buy what I've been told to buy. I wouldn't have been able tell you how much more I paid last week for my shopping trolley, filled to the gunnels with all sorts of stuff that we'll probably never eat, compared with six months ago.
But the whole rising cost thing is starting to sink in. At the beginning of the year I could fill up the tank of my Triumph for just over 12 quid. Now it costs £16. And the crisps in the vending machine at the Publican's office have gone up a staggering 12.5 per cent in price. OK, so that's only 5p, but hey, it's well above inflation.
It made me realise for the first time how fast prices are moving. Unlike me on my motorbike.
