A New Graveyard

I’ve started a new blog (click on pic). Well, not really a new blog. I won’t be adding to it daily. Or at least I hope not. I’m still not quite sure what to call it.

It’s really a graveyard. A virtual graveyard. And today I dug the first virtual grave, and laid the first body to rest in it. And the name of the deceased was Lawrence Walker. I’ve written about him before. On his memorial entry I wrote pretty much everything that I knew about him. It wasn’t much.

I often think about Lawrence Walker. He lived in Cornwall, and he felt deeply insulted by the smoking ban. He became a recluse. And a year later, he threw himself off a cliff.

For me, he’s been the first casualty of the smoking ban. Because I could understand how deeply insulted he felt. Because smoking bans are deliberate, conscious insults. Smoking bans tell millions of people that they’re poisonous and that they stink and that they’re no longer welcome. And clearly Lawrence Walker took the insult to heart. And it was as an unwelcome, stinking, poisonous human reject that he hurled himself from the clifftop. Good riddance, you can almost hear the antismoking zealots murmur.

I’ve often wondered why he took the insult so badly though. And I suspect that it was because he was a tax man, and he was doing a nasty job for the British Government, collecting taxes for them. He was already a reviled figure. After all, who likes tax collectors? And when the state for whom he had probably worked for all his life turned on him, and made a pariah of him, he lost everything. He’d been like some soldier in an army, and made his life within it, until his commanding officers betrayed him, and condemned him as if he’d been a deserter.

The photo above the new graveyard is of Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery in Belgium. I chose it because there are a few British deserters who are buried there. They also were reviled men, rejected by their own people, just like Lawrence Walker.

I’ve started the new graveyard because I see it as being just like those military cemeteries that are dotted all over northern France and Belgium. Cemeteries like these are places where the dead can be slowly gathered together, and where they can be remembered. And in France and Belgium, coming up on 100 years after World War I, they’re still finding the remains of the war dead. And when they do, they bury them in one of these cemeteries, often without a name.

The new graveyard is for all the people killed by smoking bans. Like the dead of WWI, they are at present scattered all over the world, and largely forgotten. But perhaps they can be brought together in this place, and be remembered there. It will be open to everyone. Men and women. Young and old. English and French and German and American and any other nationality. Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews. The only precondition for admission is that a strong case must be made that it was a smoking ban or some other antismoking regulation that resulted in their death. Just being a smoker, and dying a smoker, won’t be sufficient. It’ll add to the force of their application if they were fighting against or otherwise resisting smoking bans.

On these grounds, Lawrence Walker is a good candidate on all counts.

I’m planning to add Elena Brennan too. She was an old lady who fell out of a window while standing on a stool and smoking a cigarette leaning out of it. I’ve not read anywhere that smoking was banned in her flat, but I think it must’ve been. Why else would an old lady climb up onto a stool and smoke a cigarette like that, unless smoking had been banned? And she was clearly resisting to the very end.

And so was Jane O’Grady, the 97-year-old Florida smoker facing eviction from her home, who was admitted to a hospital shortly after the storm of outrage broke around her, and died there a few days later. She never surrendered either.

There are plenty more candidates. There are lots of old people who had to go outside their old folks’ homes to smoke, and wound up frozen to death. There are probably quite a few hospital patients who suffered much the same fate. And there are more suicides. Any suggestions will be welcome.

I’ll probably be quite busy for a while, digging graves for them all. I’ll most likely have several rows of them pretty soon.

Above all, these are real people who really died. They’re real people with real names and real addresses and very likely real photos. They aren’t projected figures, spun with sleight of hand, of the kind used by antismokers when they claim that smoking kills X millions. There are no names and faces for their ‘dead’, because they are all fictional deaths. But in my graveyard there’ll only be real people.

I’m not allowing comments under the new blog. It’ll be a place to just wander round the memorials, reading the faded inscriptions. And when they say that smoking bans never killed nobody, you can point them here.

Maybe if people send in photos and flowers and candles, I’ll post them up on the memorials too. I’m thinking of leaving a rose myself on every single one. Starting with Lawrence Walker.