I’ve never been one to appreciate governments bringing in legislation for ‘my own good’ because it usually results in the loss of some freedom or other. I must admit, however, that I am looking forward to Portugal’s ban on smoking in public places.
I do believe that people should be able to have their ‘smokers’ bars and ‘smokers’ clubs if they so wish but I also must admit that after twenty years as a non-smoker I find tobacco smoke irritating – even outdoors.
When I was eleven years old a kid approached me in the schoolyard and said, “I saw you smoking a cigar under a bridge.”
“You’re nuts,” I replied as I climbed on my bike and rode off.
It was only a few hours later that I realized the guy was right. A few months earlier I had been hiding under a bridge with some friends and we were smoking a cigar that one of them had lifted from his father’s collection.
We smoked a lot that year. We couldn’t buy our own cigarettes of course but one ten-year-old in the gang was our ‘Artful Dodger’ and we smoked whatever brand of cigarette he was able to steal. Those Players plain cuts could really get my head spinning.
I continued to smoke for another 28 years and was still a smoker when I first arrived in Portugal in 1984. Then one day in 1987 I quit. It wasn’t difficult because I simply wasn’t enjoying the habit anymore and one night I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this?”
At the end I had been smoking between one and two packs of SG Gigantes (the red wrapper) per day and I thought when I quit I would get cravings, particularly when I had a drink. I was lucky for I had no withdrawals whatsoever. It was weeks before friends noticed that I didn’t smoke anymore and after some months they couldn’t remember me smoking at all.
Living in the Algarve I find the smoking demographics curious indeed. Most of the Portuguese men I know smoke. Most of the Portuguese women I know don’t. Most of the estrangeiro women I know smoke. Most of the estrangeiro men I know don’t. I have no explanation for this except that maybe it is related to women’s lib.
Some years back an ex-pat woman held a party at her restaurant to celebrate her son’s first birthday. Of the twenty-five women on hand, most of them mothers, all but one smoked.
Governments generally cite health concerns for getting people to quit smoking but I have found in my experience these ‘health scares’ are largely ineffective. When we were kids in the fifties we were warned time and again not to smoke – “It will stunt your growth was a favorite line.” Medics used to come to our school and show us pictures of blackened lungs and diseased hearts and then on our lunch break we would walk down to the bridge for a smoke.
Most countries now insist that cigarette packs carry healthy warnings and even pictures of diseased organs but children simply turn them into collecting cards and still people smoke.
I fondly remember a famous judge in Canada writing in a newspaper column that he was well aware that smoking could shorten his life by seven years but he pointed out that it was the last seven not the first seven and that he had no intention of ending up sitting in a wheelchair in an old people’s home with porridge dribbling down his chin.
It will be interesting to see how the smoking ban works here in Portugal. Bans have been in place in Canada and the Unites States for nearly a decade now and bans have been successfully implemented in Ireland, Scotland and most recently Spain.
On our last trip to Spain we stopped at our usual roadside café and after a few minutes I noticed that people were smoking outside and that we were enjoying our coffees in a smoke-free environment. I don’t really worry about smoke in bars or nightclubs, as far as I am concerned it goes with the territory but I do look forward to dining in a restaurant where the only smoke is from the grilled sardines.
