When I was in Australia, couple years ago, I was still a smoker. Yes, one of those horrible, evil people who pollute the world and endanger the lives of small children and little furry animals with their plumes of noxious poisons. That was me. And when I smoked, before lighting up I always tried to find a nursery school, or a playground or petting zoo, near which to light up. So I bought a packet of cigarettes in a Sydney filling station, asking for a pack of Marlboro’ Lights. But instead of the familiar white and gold livery on the packet I got this horrible khaki and red box upon which were pictures of people dying in really horrible ways from tobacco abuse. Well that’s a strange marketing strategy, I naively thought, and enquired what happened to the handsome cowboy on a horse? The Marlboro Man, for years an aspirational figure, all cool and lifestylish and very manly and, with very intentional irony, extremely healthy looking. Where’s he gone then? Is that him depicted on the box with a tumour on his throat the size of a Nissan Micra?
“Naah, mate” drawled the disapproving Aussie fag-seller-in-petrol-station man, “pline packaging, that is; ain’t’cher seen that before?? You must be a Pom”. I was ‘a Pom’, still am, in fact. And no, I’d never seen this mythical ‘plain packaging’ before, nor the eye-watering price charged for it, though for smokers, life is never about budget.

But I understand the de-branding of cigarettes. Pulling out a pack of whatevers offers reassurance, comfort and familiarity to a smoker. Fag packets are ‘cool’, they have romance, they have glamour, they speak messages about this smoker, other than ‘he probably coughs a lot and stinks like an ash tray’. And plain packaging removes that. Which is a good thing. And it can then focus on the other aspects of the process. Like dying in agony and an old age of misery and oxygen masks.

So as a reformed (but still quite sympathetic) smoker, I approve plain packaging. In that it might, hopefully, put kids off. And if you can avoid that first cigarette, the following 40 years is a doddle.

Buoyed by the success of this plain packaging concept, even though after talking about it here for a decade, is still not actually quite happening, probably due to the amount of tax that cigarettes produce for the government, who care about our health, but apparently care more about big business and pressure groups and tax revenue, there’s now talk of extending the concept.

To food. Specifically, to sweets and chocolates. In an effort to stop little Tommy Tubby from snarfing up 6 Mars Bars with his mum’s plain-packaged cigarette money. But this is an awful idea. Its nanny statism gone mad. Apparently (and quite appallingly) Mars bars now have reduced fat (though probably not by much) and are smaller. NOT so they can make more money, heaven forbid, but to ‘protect us from obesity’. Right. 19gms of fat instead of 20 is gonna make all the difference there, I’m sure. Because ‘reduced fat!!!’ never means by very much. Yet we all know that fat is not a great thing to eat, though apparently now its far preferable to carbohydrates. But in moderation, all is fine.

So, Mr Government ‘Let’s Plain Package Everything’, why not just try to educate people about such things? Why not educate parents to get their children moving around a bit more? Eat good things as well, then a few ‘treats’ won’t hurt. Limit the intake of sugary, fatty stuff. Don’t wrap it in a brown package with pictures of the chronically obese on it.

And how would I be able to arrange my chocolate cupboard if the Milky-Ways looked the same as the Twixes?

A Mars a day; helps you work, rest and get really really fat. Good slogan.

Happy Friday

A xxxx