Smoking indoors is bad for you…

…but not for the reasons you’ve been told.

Garyk30 raised some inspiring thoughts. I know Frank Davis has brought the matter up before, and I probably have too, but as I usually blog under the influence and have babbled so much and for so long, it would take me ages to check. Hell, I have enough trouble hunting out those old stories I posted in order to keep Twitter amused.

Incidentally, tonight’s rambling words are the product of Glen Moray. In our local Morrison’s they have Whyte and Mackay at £18 (the Co-op sells it for £13 but that’s further away). Yet on the next shelf you can get Glen Moray or Ledaig, single malts, for £18.99. The extra 99p is well worth it. I’d prefer Ledaig but I have an 8-hour shift tomorrow and Ledaig would give me peaty-whisky breath. So it’s the Glen Moray.

And now to the matter at hand.

Asthma is on the rise among the cheeeldren. Second hand smoke is firmly in the frame and it is indeed a frame job. Smoking is in decline.

In fact, as all the rising allergies and ailments blamed on declining smoking show, the drones are stupid enough to accept ‘correlation = causation’ even when the correlation is negative. The real conclusion from a simple ‘correlation = causation’ argument is that smoking must have been preventing all those diseases all along. Take away the preventive action of second hand smoke and the new diseases rise.

Both arguments are nonsense, of course, but the second is just nonsense while the first is utter swivel-eyed lunacy.

It is not really smoking indoors that is bad for you. It’s being indoors. The title of the post remains true, but could as easily have read ‘watching TV indoors is bad for you’. Mind you, with some of the TVs I’ve seen in Local Gadget Shop, you’d have to sit in the garden to watch the whole thing. They are immense. Who really wants to see ‘I’m a Sillybugger, Get Me Out of Here’ at that scale?

In the olden days (probably only about 20-30 years ago for most people but now they seem like a faraway dream) we all had fireplaces. With chimneys. And fires. Yes, kids, every house had a real fire burning in the middle of it all day long and as kids ourselves, we used to play with it. Many a toy soldier came to a grisly end atop a hot coal. We did, quite literally, play with fire. It was great fun. We learned very quickly of the somewhat burny nature of our plaything and we learned the proper way to make it and control it. I suspect there now exist children who have never seen so much as a match being struck. The entire history of mankind’s relationship with fire has ended.

The fire did more than warm the house. It sent a furious updraft of air up that chimney and the house sucked in outside air through every gap, slot and crack. The air changed rapidly in those houses. Blow a puff of cigarette smoke into the air and whoosh, it’s gone. You could smoke a pipe indoors without turning the room into something resembling a steam-engine firing-up shed. Oh wait, the young won’t understand that either.

I had a rude reminder of how fast times have changed at work a while back. I had been given some bakery trays to clean by an apologetic baker. They were very greasy.

“No problem,” I said, “I have industrial strength degreaser. Spray it on and the grease lifts and turns white. It’s like watching a photo develop.”

“Huh?”

It was then I realised that, with the new digital cameras, a whole generation does not know, and never will know, what it’s like to see a photo developing in a tray! Still, that’s probably insignificant next to their total terror of the main thing that makes humanity what it is… fire.

And of course its attendant smoke. This did become a problem in crowded cities until smokeless coal (it wasn’t really, it was less-smoke coal) because on windless foggy days it could hang around for ages. Yet those fireplaces really did matter. They have been there since humanity first built any kind of home and it’s only recently that they have disappeared.

Houses are now built with no fireplace or chimney and have been for some time. My house is a tad under 20 years old and has no chimney. They are now built to be dependent on electrical or gas heating. Turn those off in January and most of Scotland will die. You don’t even need to turn them off. At the rate prices are rising, only politicians will be able to afford winter heating soon. Who then will vote for them?

Fireplaces let you burn wood from the local woodland when you couldn’t afford coal. No such option exists now. I do have a chimenea and a concrete kitchen floor so at a pinch I could survive but not everyone has such an option.

{quick digression – @TheMorrigan on Twitter reports that an aptly-named town in Kentucky has repealed its smoking ban. It’s a tiny place but it had to start somewhere}

Even so, that would not give me the same air throughput as a proper chimney. I would have to have a window open, sure, but it’s not as efficient.

I grew up with sash windows with frost on the inside in winter. In the mornings we had to wait for the coal fire to warm the house before the place was above freezing. No, it wasn’t a great thing but we survived it and coped with it. I was fortunate never to live in a house with an outside toilet but many of my friends did and they had to crack the ice before starting, every winter. Those outside toilets were not heated.

Now my house is hermetically sealed with double glazing and insulation that was shaved from an entire herd of glass-wool sheep. I have introduced gaps and vents and left unfixed the broken seals but even so, it will never approach the air transfer of a real fire and chimney. I will not close the window vents, but on nights like tonight – freezing and full of wind – I will close the windows. Heating expenses are assuaged by pullovers. Living where I live, you can bet I have some seriously warm clothing. The really bad winters of a few years back, I was typing in Steptoe-style fingerless mitts with a woolly hat on. It wasn’t a problem. The young cannot cope with this.

It is not really about smoking. At all. If I smoke a pipe or cigar with the windows closed, the place soon resembles a Victorian smoke factory at full production but roll-ups and cigs don’t produce enough to have any effect. If I’m playing with Electrofag there is no effect at all. Not even condensation on the windows. Nothing. Certainly none of that childhood indoor frost.

If you pick up a vegetable and start getting it ready for cooking or salad eating, there will be a blast of bacterial and especially fungal spores into the air. This is perfectly normal and has always happened and always will, as long as veg grows outdoors in real soil.

In the fireplace days it didn’t matter. Those airborne allergens went straight up the chimney. Now they hang around in the air so you comfortably warm people can breathe them in. Then you get asthma and other lung problems.

Then you blame it on declining smoking. You cannot blame it on your centrally-heated sealed box because you like that. You have to blame it on something you don’t like.

There has indeed been a massive change in smoking indoors in recent years. but it is not the massive change in ‘smoking’ that matters.

It is the massive change in ‘indoors’ that will kill you.

Smoking outside means smokers will be healthier and live loinger. I doubt that was the intention.