Just leave me alone! Another one bites the dust.

Justice, yeah right!

I pine for this blog when I have some respite from my carer duties, so whenever I can I read those blogs I have a fondness for, and any news items that pertains to the smoking ban whenever I can. Today is such an occasion where I play catch-up. As usual the news was not good and the first smack in the face, news wise, was the humiliation of my friends, husband and wife landlords, the McHales who ran the Painters Arms in Drighlington, Yorkshire. I wrote recently here that they were giving up their beloved pub because of many factors, of which the smoking ban played a big big part.

In the car park of the Painters Arms. Next to Ray is Godfrey Bloom MEP and next to Jill is Nick Hogan, my friend who has suffered at the hands of the smoking Nazis mentality.

I have good memories of my visits to the Painters, which took me and Mrs Yin an hour and a half's journey by train, not counting the bus ride to the train and from the train at the other end, for which you can add on another hour, but it was well worth it to listen to my friends and guest speakers, speakers like Godfrey Bloom MEP (UKIP,) Nick Hogan, who later became spokesperson for UKIP on the hospitality trade, and Nick’s friend and mentor, Hamish Howitt, to name but a few.

Our ‘local’ meetings were an eye opener and our hosts where at odds with their Pubco bosses (they had the sign above, about Freedom of Choice and smoking, hanging on their frontage before we made it a meeting place and they where “asked” to take it down.)

When we made our meeting place at the Painters we were struck by the fact that we could smoke and chat without fear but we were well aware that we would be the least persons to pay the price of that dissent towards the smoking ban experiment, we were well aware that the publican would bear the brunt of this dissent and we went to some ridiculous attempts to not reveal the location nor the publicans involved while chatting on the F2C forum.

The Painters was visibly split into two sections and the landlords, Ray & Jill, designated them to smoking and non smoking sections, and you could not physically smell smoke coming from one section to the other, even when us “unrepentant smokers” descended upon their premises. It’s not impossible of course (and I’m not even mentioning air extraction, which most pubs have, if not all )but you would need to have the nose of a sniffer dog at Heathrow airport, looking for illicit drugs stuck up your arse, to find any tobacco smoke or tobacco substances in the air that might, just might, flow your anti smoking way.


As for the “dangers” of second, third hand and, when they find a way to tout it, fourth hand smoke, well, I will treat it with the contempt it deserves!

Jill & Ray ran an orderly pub, they knew there customers well and how to best serve (handle) them, they separated the wheat from the chaff, the smoker from the non smoker, the belligerent from the pacifist and the enquirer from the shit stirrer! In short they ran a pub that I want to see around my area, not a plastic shell of a non human pub!!!

But genuine people like Jill and Ray must be stamped out with the most sternest of Jackboots and nothing is forgotten in the smoker wars:

A landlord and landlady were today counting the cost of letting customers smoke at their West Yorkshire pub.
Ray and Gillian McHale were each fined £350 and ordered to pay a combined £4,540 in costs after pleading guilty at Leeds Magistrates' Court to repeated breaches of the law on lighting up in enclosed public places.

The offences occurred while the couple were running the Painters Arms on Bradford Road in Drighlington.

In this country that I was born into, no matter that I am Scottish, I thought of it as an upholder of democracy, the cradle of truth and the common man? I am just as shocked as you, dear readers, to find out that this is not so. I used to be anti business in my younger days when I thought that business was against the common man until I met the likes of Jill and Ray, hard working people that were dealt a cruel hand due to vested interests.

You see I equated hard work with physical graft, and that’s not to say that running a pub is an easy option to physical graft, as any landlord/lady will testify.

One of my friends who was at every meeting we held was Judith Morris, a business women of note who founded York Tutors, has got up a fund to pay off Jill and Ray’s fines. Judith, a cheque is on it’s way to you at 33 Moorland Road, York YO10 4HF.

Meanwhile the hatred of smokers goes on as the anti smoker gets more and more puerile publicity without question and their hatred knows no bounds:

"I will successfully kill someone who
smokes. I encourage any non-smokers who are reading this to go out and kick the shit out of smokers.” (Pat Nurse’s blog.)

Yeah, say that to my face you mother******!

As ever, Dick Puddlecote sees through the flim flam of tobacco control and the (anti smokers) fruitless attempts to denormalise the smoker and get shitheads, like the MOFU above, to further denigrate people who indulge in a legal pastime.

I will not be made to feel guilty for my smoking, end of! Just leave me alone!

 

You just know you MUST fight!