No Smoke Without Fire

Before I start I just want to say a few things. I am not a smoker. No one in my family is a smoker. Nor is any of us employed in the tobacco industry or otherwise affected by it.

This morning on BBC News, just before 7:30, a pro-smoking campaigner was speaking out against a new anti-smoking television advertisement and surprisingly I agreed with him whole heartedly.

The advertisement in question shows smoke creeping throughout a house and wreathing around a child - the point being to not smoke around children. Well, obviously I agree with the sentiment, as indeed did the pro-smoking campaigner, but he made several really important points:

Asthma in children has increased whilst smoking rates are decreasing. Blaming smokers for their children's health problems is not necessarily justified. Plenty of children of non-smokers suffer asthma and other illnesses "associated with smoking".

The same advert could have been made for any other pollutant - such as dustmites or the chemicals that impregnate our carpets, sofas etc. The interviewer's come back was that those pollutants are unavoidable. This is simply not true. Admittedly the alternatives can prove impractical and expensive - hard floors, washable rugs, alternative furniture and air-conditioning units are all potential solutions only really worth considering if someone in your home has a severe allergy.

The 50s and 60s babyboomers were a generation largely raised in smoky homes and yet people are living longer and healthier lives. No one is suggesting smoke is good for you but can it really be as dangerous as it's made out? I was raised in a smoke free home and yet I am asthmatic; I know people who were raised by chain smokers who are perfectly healthy. Hardly conclusive but certainly suggestive.

But the most important point is this; how far are the Government going to go in dictating people's actions in their own homes? We've already had cases of parents being prosecuted for allowing their children (subsequently taken into care) to become obese and yet strangely drug addicts seem to regularly retain custody of their offspring.

In my OU course I've recently been looking at the Communist dictatorships of Russia (via Stalin) and China (via His Holiness The Dalai Lama) and I can certainly see a parallel between those dictatorships and the increasing interference of the state in our supposed democracy. How much more control does the Government want over what people choose to do in the privacy of their own homes? Whilst I don't think parents should smoke around their kids should having children mean you no longer have freedom of choice? Perhaps children should be offered freedom of choice - and be able to leave smoky homes...or neglectful homes, drunken homes, homes with parents who fight all the time? Why is it that a child can't get away from any number of bad - but not criminally so - situations until they are at least 16 years old?

Keep Out Of Reach Of Children

Six little words, so often noticed on everyday household items yet so rarely understood, let alone heeded.

So many people foolishly think the warning refers to the item on which the words appear - that the batteries, lighters or whatever are to be kept away from children. Wrong!!! After all many things are dangerous to children but do not carry such a warning. For example - a bottle of vodka would be hazardous in the hands (or stomach) of a child but it it is more likely a harrassed parent, driven to the edge of sanity, will be the one reaching for the bottle. For a parent to see that warning all too painfully late might be the last straw which sends them in a swan-dive off the nearest multi-storey car-park. Therefore no "keep out of reach of children" message appears on the label of the vodka bottle.

The words are, in fact, a warning to the reader to keep at a safe distance from children. Children are dangerous to your mental and physical wellbeing; they drain your resources and destroy your property.

Men take this well-meant advice far more than women. A man at the first hint of a child will often flee - literally! A woman tends to go all sappy and often doesn't realise the error of her ways until the child is a teenager...by which time the woman's hair has prematurely greyed from stress.

I can't stand children. Never could, even when I was one! How I ended up with two of the little blighters I am still not entirely sure about. "Hormones" had a lot to do with it, and a persuasive ex who subsequently fled in the best time-honoured tradition.

There are no maternal-instincts in my family. My own existence is similarly a confusion to my own mother - and she has had over 32 years to ponder the question. Perhaps instead of maternal-instincts in our genes we have a kind of hereditary insanity that causes us to have children despite despising the little beasts?

Thankfully my little monsters are not so little now; in fact I am well past the halfway stage! I hope and pray that by the time I turn 40 they will have flown the nest and I will be in peace at last...although the way things are going that peace might be more of the "eternal rest" variety... A friend of mine has rug-rat commitments until the age of 52. Rather her than me!

Can you tell I have been having some trials and tribulations with my offspring? Stealing, lies, fighting, cheating, betrayal of trust...and that's just the last 24 hours! Some days I really wonder how come I have managed to not kill them...