When he let me come up for air there was a muted applause to one side and we turned to see a group of girls in the darkness of a smoking shelter on the edge of the restaurant's car park. They were all smoking and I noticed that although the temperature was around freezing, they were very scantily clad with no coats, bare arms and legs and I thought they must be mad to have come out into the cold for "another nail in their coffins" as one of my friends, a nurse, puts it.
For several days afterwards, I became aware of "the people outside." When smoking was first banned in offices and public places, it looked as if there were strike pickets or protesters out in force. I don't know when their numbers dwindled or when they became almost invisible, but the encounter at the restaurant made me wonder how many were still inhaling toxic waste after all the health warnings and punitive tax hikes their habit attracted.
It is by no means a scientific study but most of the people I saw on my travels seem to fall into two main groups: people who looked as if they might be economically disadvantaged and very young people. I have to visit or pass through a number areas of social deprivation and both groups become more visible there. Possibly because there seem to be fewer men around during the day, the number of women smokers far outnumbered the men.
In addition to the almost daily announced risks of cancer and lung disease; the ever stronger restrictions to limit the dangers of passive smoking – particularly where children are involved; the discomfort of having to go outside, whatever the weather and cigarette prices which seemed astronomical to me when I checked in a local shop seems to be huge disincentives to smoking and it may be that there are psychological reasons for the persistence of the "people outside".
Risk 6 - Driving
Many activities are banned while driving, either explicitly or by catch-all offences such as "Driving without due care and attention".
Using a mobile phone without a hands-free is prohibited in the UK and although there are prosecutions, it doesn't prevent drivers speeding through towns and down motorways with one hand clamped to their ear.
Eating and drinking while driving has been heavily penalized on occasions.
At least one driver has been prosecuted for reading a map spread out over the steering wheel while travelling at speeds of 70 mph in the outside lane and gripping the wheel with his knees
A woman was penalized after being filmed by the police driving without her hands on the wheel as she applied her make-up.
I use my car a lot either during the week travelling between pupil’s homes or longer journeys at weekends and during holidays. It is rare for me to travel in traffic without seeing the sort of behavior I mention above, sometimes bordering on the totally insane. The most recent was a mother with her back to the windscreen as she knelt on her seat to do something with the straps of her child's baby seat while the car travelled slowly down a busy shopping street.
Are such people unaware of the potential outcomes to themselves and other road users? I am quite a confident driver but it is sometimes very worrying that no matter how well I may drive, the unknown idiots behind the wheel of their killing machines can make driving a lottery.
I tend not to worry about potential risks in my life although that is not the same as ignoring such risks and even taking steps to minimize or eliminate them. In doing this I am very aware how politicians and others who affect public opinion can raise risk levels for ordinary people.
On terror, I am not just talking about the political debacle and military tragedy for all physically and emotionally involved in Afghanistan and Iraq but the wider "war on terror!" which has created the monster it was supposed to eradicate.
In other areas of life, there are powerful financial, religious, political forces which will not hesitate to undermine rational arguments to further their own ends. One of the major contributors to the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of deaths from lung cancer and heart disease as a result of smoking has to be the corporate millions of dollars, pounds, francs etc. devoted to advertising a lethal product worldwide. In the US and UK, private medicine and insurance fund campaigns against publicly funded health care. Many here in the UK believe that the whole policy of the West on the Middle East, including the Iraq fiasco is based on the interests of the oil industry.
There are many forces compounding the level of risk we have to encounter and perhaps we should all start to investigate them.
Letter from a Citizen - con't from pg 50