Dear LPG, 

Having worked in offices in central London for quite a bit of my past and distant working life, train travel was part of most of my days for a long time.  But as you get older, rush hour travelling becomes something many of us are happy not to have to remember.

I rarely have to do it now although I often wonder why travelling by night is so different from travelling by bus or train during the day time. Even when it is not that late, winter evenings make most of the afternoon seem like night.  

 
The lack of light beyond the windows give that feeling of looking out into the dark and seeing nothing apart from a very different version of your reflection in the window.  A pre-Christmas evening journey is a really good way to see the efforts of the decorators, both domestic and corporate, as their skills and the advances in Christmas decoration lighting are more evident each year, but when I turned my attention back to what was happening in the train I realised things have changed a lot inside too.

One Saturday evening not so long ago, I went to meet up with a friend and see a play in London and I could not get over how crowded the train was considering that the pandemic restrictions had just been relaxed at that time.  The thing that alarmed me was just how many young people there were on the way up to central London.  Even more worrying was that so many of them were smoking those vape cigarettes and, not only were they smoking them but sharing them so that the plastic cylinders were being passed from person to person and mouth to mouth.   

Nearly everyone thought that e-cigarettes were the answer for those smokers who just could not give up the habit, although we have since worked out that while they are better than the real thing they have been proved not to be without their own problems.

I wonder if Sir Walter Raleigh  knew what health issues came with this habit  would have introduced so many of us to the original ones way back in rh 16th century ,or why when the e-cigarettes were first introduced to us in the mid-2000s when quite a few people did not like them they still became popular;  why the 2007 ban on smoking in public places was not more successful, and why so many of our youngsters  are sharing the things in the light of a pandemic-wide virus which we all, by now, know is transferrable through  bodily fluids (after all that was what the whole mask thing was all about). 

The sad thing is that the young people I saw on the train that day are all clearly under thirty which means that they should all know how each of the above mentioned scenarios can harm them.  Any sort of smoking is bad enough but this makes sharing them doubly dangerous.  

Many of us have grandchildren in that age bracket; grandchildren who should have been too young to form a smoking habit and, all we grandparents can do is talk to them because I suspect that even if their parents are leading by example, at least some of those grandchildren will be more likely to share such a secret with a grandparent than a parent who is completely ignorant of what goes on beyond their jurisdiction.

QF, Crofton Park
QF leaves us a little online information… 

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