12 Sep 2008
Leave us our simple pleasures
I’ve just woken
up from my August torpor to face up to the fact that no, we are not getting an
Indian summer. Having spent early September huddled in front of the fire, I
decided, when a few shivering rays of sun broke through the cloud this morning,
to go into the nearest town to see what was going down.
Some optimist had put a pair of café
tables on the pavement outside the health store/deli, and my heart skipped like
a young ram at the thought of coffee and cake in the watery sushine. Until I saw the ‘No Smoking’ signs on
them.
Here is a man who
puts tables on a narrow pavement so you drink your coffee in a miasma of
traffic fumes, and he’s telling us we can’t smoke? It’s not as if coffee’s
exactly healthy – or will he be offering only dispiriting tisanes next? Might
there be a dress code, even?
I don’t smoke at
the moment, thanks to the grubby Nicorette patches which cover my arms like a
rash, but I think it’s a disgrace if a woman can’t have a smoke while she puts
her feet up at an outside table. This is the public street we’re talking about,
not a forecourt.
And now I see
that the Corpo is banning the drinking of alcohol on the streets of Dublin. No
one wants messy, aggressive drunks on the street, but what is so wrong with having a can of lager with your lunchtime sandwich on the steps of the Central
Bank?
Just as the Church stops telling us all the
fiddling little things we’re not allowed to do, the State starts. So let’s hear
it for Judge Mary Fahy, who this week refused to record convictions against
Galway restaurateurs who served wine with meals on Good Friday. She will
probably get her knuckles rapped for having flown in the face of the law, and
will involve the restaurateurs in considerable expense if the cases go to
appeal, but it’s great to see a judge refusing to go along with a ridiculously
antiquated law whose breach harms no one. With the weather that’s in it, we
deserve a few simple pleasures.