London's smoking

Another day, another train, this time to Euston by way of London Victoria where I step outside to have a smoke. As I light up, I notice a dreadlocked and bearded man stooping down and collecting cigarette butts from the ground. He picks them up individually, examines them – perhaps for their degree of squashed-ness or amount of remaining tobacco – and puts them in his pocket. Another form of recycling of a kind, maybe made easier since the introduction of the public smoking ban nearly two years ago.

My first experience of the smoking ban in action was not here in London but in New York. By the time I visited in November 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban had been in place for two and a half years. The New Yorkers had adapted to it, had added sophisticated codes of conduct in bars, for instance, where the placing of a cardboard drink mat on top of a half full glass was a notation which meant ‘I’ve gone outside for a smoke – back soon to finish my drink’. Sometimes this led to the farcical situation of a cavernous empty bar full of hatted half drunk drinks and a clientele entirely huddled - shivering, puffing and beer-less - under a microscopic canopy out on the pavement. I guess the bar tenders learned to talk to themselves.

I’ve plenty of time so I catch the number 73 bus, a delightful ride that takes in Hyde Park, Marble Arch and the full length of Oxford Street, covered on this blustery day by a thin throng of shoppers and a fine down of white blossom from the slender trees that line each side. I get off the bus near Euston and walk the few hundred yards to the station itself.

A man with a tattooed face and a black bomber jacket snoozes in his wheelchair on the concourse outside. Around him men and women in suits and skirts flow and converse with overly loud hand gestures and exaggerated annunciation, or talk into mobile phone wires clipped to their lapels. A few feral pigeons strut and squabble over crumbs near his feet. I stand in the lea of a doorway smoking and watching the man with the tattoos. His head is rolled back onto the girdle of his shoulders and he is wearing only one shoe, his other foot strapped up in some kind of brace. He is sleeping soundly beneath the faintly illuminated Pret a Manger sign, eyes tight shut.

I cross the jammed road to Friends House where the meeting is being held and am directed to the correct room by an older man behind a golden brown curved desk. This, the HQ of the Quaker movement in the UK, is also a convenient and central place to hire a room in London. It’s cheap too, and houses a café and a bookshop. When I come out for a smoke a couple of hours later at coffee break, the man with the tattooed face is manoeuvring his wheelchair into the small gardens and looking up at the sky.

I retrace my route to Victoria station by tube. The rush hour is brewing and there are no free seats on the underground so I cling to a handrail provided for the purpose and roll from side to side and foot to foot with the motion of the train. It’s a bit like being on a boat but without the view or the sea air; perhaps more like being stuck in the hold or the engine room for the duration. I’m standing near a family group of 7 or 8 people spanning three generations from grandfather to 6 year old. One of a pair of pre-teenage brothers accidentally brushes my bosom with his hand as he goes to grab the handrail without looking. He blushes furiously and I chuckle as his mother – about my age – smilingly apologises for his embarrassing near miss. His brother, of course, teases him mercilessly about his blushes and his clumsiness until they get off the tube at Green Park.



NB - I allowed myself a small congratulatory pat on the back for putting into practice today work-related lessons learnt the hard way from years of mistakes. Namely, that in my tunnel-visioned previous incarnation of a few years ago I’d have driven through heavy traffic into the office first for an hour of pointless hard graft before then dashing for the train and arriving at the meeting – inevitably late – in a flushed and clammy mess.

Lessons learned were more specifically as follows:

1) Life is short and work an ephemeral side show to the main feature

2) The nature of my job means that sometimes I’m being paid to go to meetings. When that’s the case, then that’s my task for the day.

And so I got up at leisure, bathed, faffed, and strolled comfortably to the train for a 10:26 departure. I arrived the best part of an hour before the meeting started at 1:30 too. No sweat.