Smoking, sunbathing & nagging......

It will come as no surprise that Nanny Nagger is at it again.

 

We are currently in a heat wave (by our standards) with temps heading towards 30C and no rain forecast. Needless to say, Nanny is bombarding us with nagging messages to drink more water. She tells us that you can get sun-burn if you stay in the sun too long. Well, who’d a-thought it?

 

According to the media, it is estimated that 700 people have already died. Apart from 2 SAS recruits who conked out during a training exercise, no actual deaths have been reported. The figures are an extrapolation from the last heat-wave. That must have been in the last century.

 

Actually, the greatest danger is having a driving shunt when distracted by all the scarcely dressed young ladies parading the streets.

 

And here’s another piece of official silliness.

 

I have quit the weed and now use an e-cigarette, which is actually better than smoking as it gives a double charge of nicotine without the ill-effects of tar and other impurities. There is no smoke, only an odourless vapour. The cost is about 10% of cigarettes, and no dirty ash-trays, no smell of stale smoke, no brown stains on the décor. 

 

It is the ideal way of giving up smoking and one would have thought that the medical establishment would have welcomed it with open arms.

 

Step forward the meddlers in Brussels. They are saying that the nicotine fluid is a medication and must therefore be put through the drug testing routines. This would ban e-cigs for maybe 7 years. The immediate effect  will be that the fluid is smuggled, very easy because it comes in a very small bottle.

 

Some proper experts have a different take.

 

‘Nicotine itself is not a particularly hazardous drug," says Professor John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for the Royal College of Physicians.

 

"It's something on a par with the effects you get from caffeine.

 

"If all the smokers in Britain stopped smoking cigarettes and started smoking e-cigarettes we would save 5 million deaths in people who are alive today. It's a massive potential public health prize."

 

Meanwhile, the UK government is muttering about registering it as a medicine and supplying it on the NHS. 

 

One certainty is that they will tax it.

 

There are now over 1.5 million users. It is an easy tax-cow.

 

So why would some wowsers want to ban it?

 

Because we enjoy it, that’s why!