Another dream gone!

Government is ineffective. It’s official. Today gave me proof.

It is a chastening thing to find out that the people who constantly remind us that they are entirely dependent on our good behaviour and who only live to serve have failed us, or rather have given us too many opportunities to fail.

Perhaps it’s our fault. It must be. Our Government strives to bring us perfection from their standpoint of omniscience; and we fail them. We wilfully ignore their thoughtful rules and live our sordid little lives in defiance of their precepts.

On the trip to and from work (luckily not my work, but that’s not important) I counted seventeen people using their mobile phones. Of those eight of them were driving Little White Vans or larger, in one case very much larger. The count of seventeen people does not include two lorry drivers who, in suspiciously quick succession passed me, both of them with heads back drinking the last drops from hefty mugs.

Quite apart from the danger of their activities, I think it is the brazen couldn’t-care-less attitude which they demonstrate that is so infuriating.

Let’s be honest here: who, owning a mobile phone has not used it in a car while driving. I certainly cannot plead total innocence, but in mitigation I would point out that the first time I did it was when I was taking books to Oxfam in St Mary Street and as parking is limited with militant traffic wardens lurking thickly I phoned ahead when I was at the traffic lights by the Castle to let them know I was imminent so they could whisk out and take the books.

The second time was in the notorious traffic jam on my return from Gloucester when just outside Newport all movement stopped. In my defence here I have to say that although I was on a motorway I was stationary with the engine switched off and at my last gasp of patience and just needed to talk to someone to talk to or my boredom would have relieve my boredom!

You see, an admitted transgressor, but more saint like than sinner! And I don’t use my mobile phone in the car. I am therefore pure and have a total right to castigate those people who wilfully defy the law and live lives of total depravity!

All drivers break the law. The driver who maintains that he has never broken the speed limit is a liar – or someone who, by his tedious driving, has forced someone else to break the law by overtaking to get him out of the way!

It’s easy to be hard on those people who do things that don’t attract you. Smoking.

The days are running out for the smokers as they face exclusion from their favourite watering holes and eating places when the new laws come into force. For someone like myself who has never smoked (with any conviction) and hates the smell of cigarette smoke and also hates the health risks that come with passive smoking, it is like a dream come true.

My father, a life long smoker, always told me that, if laws were introduced to ban smoking in public places he would abide by them, but, as there were no laws forbidding him to smoke, he would continue to smoke in public places. I never really understood this attitude. Any more than I understood my mother’s ability to give up smoking for Lent and then start again on Easter Sunday. It took me years to get my mother to give up smoking and I never succeeded with my father. I have no love of cigarettes.

My sense of fulfilled triumph at the banning of cigarettes in public places is tempered by a sympathy for all those addicts who are going to find themselves more and more marginalised in normal society. The government has spent more on information about what is going to happen on the second of April rather than spending a vast sum of money on subsidised help to rid the addicts of their habit. There is nothing worse than walking around town and seeing what looks like groups of spivs smoking at the entrances to their various places of work. Banning smoking in firms and offices and shops is only the start of the long struggle to get rid of smoking for good.

I do look forward to smoke free pubs and public places. I just wonder about the action of the resentful minority and the enthusiasm of enforcement.

I wonder if you can make a citizen’s arrest!