ANTI SOCIAL CLUB

 

I have been a non-smoker for the best part of four years now and I smoked for the previous thirty-two.

I gave up smoking because I decided it was the right thing to do at the time.

Not because it was bad for me or because apart from Cancer and Heart disease Smoking has been blamed for everything from Blindness to impotence, I wasn’t worried about my heath after all you always think it will never happen to you.

Nor was it because it has become such an anti-social habit spawning little clusters of social lepers huddled around doorways or rubbish bins.

No, I gave up because with a wife three children and a cat I just couldn’t afford it anymore.

I certainly didn’t stop because of the social Nazis, that annoying group of people who are not satisfied with living with their own lifestyle choices, not smoking, not eating meat, saving the planet, and inexplicably wearing beige but want to convert us too.

In fact, they are determined not to rest until we are a world of beige clad, non-smoking vegetarian tree huggers.

During my thirty-two-year reign as a satisfied smoker I never once tried to persuade a perfect stranger to light up nor have I ever suggested to a vegetarian that they “get their laughing gear around a chicken leg”.

Having said all that I would stress that I have urged anyone who’s favourite colour is beige to seek professional help.

I have also anonymously sent colour charts in the post to the more tragic sufferers.

Now I refer to these people as social Nazis these are of course not to be confused with Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Party who ruled Germany.

Those Nazis quite frankly would never have dared to invade Poland if the storm troopers had had to wear beige.

But despite a very effective media campaign Cigarettes are not the personification of evil in the world today - alcohol is and the social Nazis need a dose realism and a refocusing of their energies onto a much more troubling situation in our society today namely alcohol induced anti-social behaviour.

Come Friday and Saturday night every town center in Britain is filled with drunken youth.

The young who cannot handle the booze that is so readily available and for them so affordable, spill out onto the street either to commit an assault on a fellow reveler or to be assaulted or perhaps to collapse in the night air and drown on their own vomit.

Yet we do nothing to stop it on the contrary we give evermore access to drinkers and we have made alcohol available 24/7.

So what in society is to blame?, Smoking, Kebab vans, coffee shops or bars, pubs and clubs?

Nobody wraps the car around a tree because they smoked too many Woodbines down the “Lamb and Faggott”, and a man doesn’t go home and beat his wife because he smoked a whole pack of Rothman’s.

Nobody gets stopped by the police for having exceeded the legal limit of chili sauce in their system.

Nobody starts a fight outside the kebab shop because “he looked at my girlfriend in a funny way” as a result of an overindulgence of kebab meat.

For me the answer is obvious, the car that crashed into the tree was driven by a drunk driver, the man who went home and beat his wife was a drunk, the driver stopped by the police was a drunk and as for the man outside the kebab shop well it was the eight pints of Stella he had down the pub before he arrived at the kebab house that made him want to fight.

I like a drink myself, but I do it in moderation but be in no doubt that left unchecked Alcohol ruins lives.