Edging towards sanity...

... but no doubt infuriating the Righteous.

A number of hospitals are reintroducing "smoking shelters". They are doing so on health grounds: not, of course, because they have changed their minds about the hazards of cigarettes – that really would be a spectacular medical U-turn – but because patients have been caught smoking in dangerous places. Stairwells, lavatories, storerooms: nowhere except the operating theatre is safe, it seems. Some patients have even been caught smoking next to the oxygen store.

The normal pattern of prohibition. Take away the opportunity to be reasonable and sensible by removing smoking rooms and what else is going to happen? Don't get too excited, though. It says 'shelters' not smoking rooms, and The Teletubbygraph was helpless to resist the temptation for a little Righteous style dig at smokers implying they should give up and that they wouldn't be in hospital if they had.

There are a few more stressful experiences than a stay in hospital, and it is not an easy time to give up. So let the patients puff away in their shelters – reflecting, perhaps, that if they had kicked the habit earlier they might not be there in the first place.

Oh, really? I was still a smoker on my last visit to hospital and it had fuck all to do with what I was going in for. In fact I've never been to hospital for anything related to smoking or any other lifestyle choice I'd made. Nor was it at all stressful being unable to smoke because they had me off my tits on morphine - that drug of instant evil that a previous generation of Righteous had banned - and what a success story that wasn't. The fact I subsequently gave up smoking and never became a heroin addict suggests I'm either unusual, and I assure you I'm not, or that there's a lot of bullshit being peddled by those who love telling others how to live.

Which of course is what the Righteous themselves are addicted to.