By Josh Gardner, who thinks TikTok is a reliable news source
SMOKING is evil. The only people who smoke are drunk middle-aged women outside clubs and people in black and white films. Yes, I smoke three spliffs a day but that’s different. It’s natural drugs from a local dealer, not an evil corporation.
I’ve had it drummed into me all through school how bad smoking is, so imagine my shock when my dad casually mentioned that when he started work in the olden days, people smoked in the office! Then mum chipped in and said they smoked in pubs too!
They even used to light up cigarettes in restaurants. Apparently they had ‘smoking sections’. Didn’t they know that smoke can float around wherever it decides to? People were really thick in the past.
There’s so much to unpack here. Dad’s first office was definitely not paperless. They didn’t have email so they wrote letters on paper and put them in envelopes. They also had printers which used reams of joined-together paper. Then they lit up a fag!
It was an inferno waiting to happen. How the whole country wasn’t constantly ablaze and everyone didn’t die in a fire, I’ll never know. It’s a miracle I’m here to make Barbenheimer memes.
And as for smoking in a pub, well, I rarely go into one, unless my dad forces me because he wants to have a bonding moment now I’m 18. I don’t get it. Why do people want to sit in a dingy room that has, at most, a single screen in it, and drink disgusting beer? It’s gross. But if people smoked in them it would be even more disgusting. Apparently they flicked their ash into special trays that were kept on the table top. What the fuck, guys?
Then they started reminiscing about being able to smoke on the train. There was a special carriage apparently, full of people puffing away. Apparently you could smoke on planes too. And in school staff rooms. You could even smoke in hospitals.
There must have been burning planes falling from the sky all the time, and piles of dead children everywhere from passive smoking at school. I bet if you had an operation the surgeon and all the nurses would be flicking ash in you. That is so unhygienic.
Mum says times change and things that are actually pretty weird seem normal at the time, but she’s probably got brain damage from the chemicals in cigarettes. Right, I’m off to play Call of Duty with horrible strangers who literally scream ‘FAG!’ at me for six hours. It’s great.
