Premonition of Civil War

The smoking ban marked the end of toleration in Britain. Here was a law which said: “Smokers Not Welcome.” Here was a law that made intolerance mandatory. Here was a law that made the cheery pub landlord into the watchful custodian of his customers, and the customers custodians of each other. It’s such a vile law.

And when I, a smoker, can no longer be tolerated, why should I tolerate anyone else? I can sense my own intolerance rising. For years and years I’ve happily gone along with the demands of antismoking friends, that I not smoke in their houses, that I go outside. And although they wouldn’t tolerate me, I tolerated them. But with the smoking ban, it all became too much. It became too one-sided. They had everything, and we smokers had nothing. There was no more give and take. There was only take. And I found myself asking myself: why should I go on tolerating the intolerant? And coming to the conclusion that there was no reason to go on tolerating them. Such toleration and forbearance belonged to a tolerant and civilised era that had now gone.

My new intolerance found expression at a dinner party. There were four of us. The old friend who had invited me to his house, and a friend of his, and this friend’s girlfriend. I’ve forgotten what her name was, so I’ll call her Shonk, because my principal recollection was of the thick black hair masking her face, out of which her rather large nose protruded.

Anyway, the dinner had gone off well enough, and towards the end Shonk’s boyfriend asked my host if he might smoke a cigarette. But before any reply came, Shonk loudly declared that she couldn’t stand smoking, and if anyone wanted to smoke, they’d have to go outside. It seemed to me that it was a bit much for her to demand this in someone else’s house than her own, but she nevertheless got her way, and the matter was dropped, and no cigarettes were smoked.

Conversation then moved on to the smoking ban, of which Shonk strongly approved. She said it was so much nicer in pubs now. I said that I no longer went to pubs if I could help it, and that I utterly hated the ban. “Oh dear,” said Shonk, “Somebody else said exactly the same to me only a few weeks ago.” She then told her boyfriend that he was forbidden to smoke at her house in future. Was this the first time she’d told him this? He appeared quite indifferent.

Then Shonk started getting personal. “Why,” she asked of me, “are you wearing a hat?” I almost always wear a hat, just to keep my bald head warm. I’ve been wearing one for years. And nobody ever says anything about it. But not so Shonk. She wasn’t having it. “Why don’t you take it off?” she insisted. “You’ll look much nicer without it.”

At this point, I snapped. Not only has she just demanded that nobody smoke, but now she was demanding that I take off my hat as well.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as demanding as you are,” I said. “First you demand that nobody smoke, and now you’re demanding that I take off my hat as well. I always wear a hat. No, I’m not going to take my hat off!”

At this, Shonk fell silent. My friend confirmed that I did indeed alway wear a hat. And the conversation moved off uneasily onto other subjects,  the changing face of Britain, the growing intolerance of new minorities, the strange emergence of pediophilia, and so on.

It was interrupted by the sound of sobbing coming from Shonk.

“What’s the matter?” someone asked her.

Through her tears, Shonk blurted out, “My father abused me when I was a little girl.”

Perhaps on another occasion I would have been sympathetic, but all I could see happening here was a naked, manipulative attempt by Shonk to win back the initiative that I had wrenched away from her. What else was the reason for coming out with this revelation – except to win sympathy and regain a slight social advantage, even if she would do so at the expense of the good name of her father?

It didn’t work. After a few questions had been asked of her, and little interest had been shown in her childhood calamity, the conversation began to return to its former course. At which point Shonk, still sniffing, announced that she was going home. And she got up and left.

At this point I apologised to my host for what I’d said to her. And I apologised to her boyfriend. But both of them said that there was nothing for me to apologise for. “It was about time somebody said it,” her boyfriend declared.

Despite this, I later thought about what had happened. I’d said something I wouldn’t have said a few years earlier.Back then, I’d have bitten my lip and soldiered through it all smiling. But this was something I was no longer prepared to do. I was no longer prepared to uncomplainingly put up with people like Shonk. If she couldn’t tolerate me, why should I tolerate her? Something in me had snapped. And it hadn’t snapped that evening. It had snapped when the smoking ban had come into force.

Shonk had also confirmed my worst fears about antismokers. It wasn’t that they just wanted to stop people smoking, but they also wanted to stop them doing anything else which they didn’t fully approve of. Which could be absolutely anything at all.

But I realised that I had myself become intolerant, in accordance with the new age of intolerance. I was no longer prepared to live and let live. And I really didn’t want to know someone like Shonk. What was the point of knowing someone who was so intolerant, so demanding, so utterly and completely self-centred? I’d never met Shonk before, and I’ve not seen her since. But if I did meet her again, I’d probably want to tell her that I simply didn’t want to know her. And that all the bastard antismokers could meet up with their fellow bastards in their own bastard non-smoking pubs. I didn’t want to know any of them any more. I just wanted a pub where me and other tolerant people could meet up for a pint and a smoke.

It’s not just smoking. Midway through the evening, when I was refusing to take off my hat, Shonk had asked me what my star sign was. And I had refused to tell her, saying it was completely irrelevant. I’d also felt like saying that astrology was complete bollocks. And so was aromatherapy. And Feng Shui. I have tolerated all those deranged things too. But I don’t see why I should any more.

And so, in future, I expect myself to become uncharacteristically forthright. No more mister nice guy. No more tolerant acceptance of other people’s foibles. I’ll be telling them that what they believe is complete cock. And why not? Now that intolerance has come, isn’t it only right to join in with the spirit of the age? It’ll make for an angry, nasty, divided world. But that’s the world that the smoking ban introduced.

Somewhere down the line, as the intolerance they have unleashed comes back to hit them in their faces, and they find themselves no longer being tolerated, there will no doubt be calls from the intolerant people – those who demanded a ban on smoking – for a new spirit of toleration, for an attitude of live and let live, and for a return to kinder and more civilised society. But by then it may be too late.

Many years ago I once asked a Spanish friend of mine how the outbreak of the Spanish civil war had affected Spanish people. Had it divided one part of the country from another? Or one town from another? No, she said, it had divided families. It had divided brother from brother, father from son, grandmother from granddaughter. At the time I’d wondered how such a strange thing might happen, because it was entirely outside my experience.

No longer. Watching communities come apart, and friendships fracture in the wake of the smoking ban, I can see the beginnings of the very same thing happening all around me. It doesn’t really matter whether the divisions are about the political organisation of society – as they were in the Spanish civil war -, or whether they are about religious observances – as they were during the Prayer Book Rebellion in 16th century England -, or whether they are about the social custom of smoking tobacco. Once one side or other grabs complete control, and enforces its own preference, to the complete exclusion of any opposition, there exists a de facto state of civil war. It will not be one in which there will be any fighting at first. It will just be one in which the kinds of intense animosities required for civil war will have been ignited, and which will begin to set fire to new tinder in a growing blaze.

There is a painting by Salvador Dali, a Premonition of Civil War, painted on the eve of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936. In it, an edifice of various convulsed limbs fights with itself, one hand grasping a breast, while a foot stamps down upon a flattened face. It is a painting that I am only just beginning to understand, even though I have known it for many years. I’m beginning to see how Dali could have had such a premonition, because I am now having the same kind of premonition.