The foyer/bar area at the Barbican is an interesting exercise in studying public behaviour.
Last night, I was in an amorphous mass of people huddled round a litter bin to catch the ash from our cigarettes. A few yards away a rather snotty middle-aged woman exclaimed loudly and pointedly "You would have thought it would be non-smoking. There are people smoking."
In a way, she had a point. However, I thought her approach was rude. Am I now the only person who thinks it is bad manners to make rude remarks about other people, not to them, in their earshot?
To be honest, I would have thought it would be non-smoking. Indeed, it is almost non-smoking in an ad hoc self-regulated way. Almost always when I attend the Barbican, the smokers are outside on the Lakeside Terrace. The exceptions are when it's lashing it down, or, like last night, bitterly cold and windy. Even then, the smokers lurk on the periphery. Many hovering in the vacuum between the double doors.
I don't know what her problem is. When we were all smoking in the loos at Taba airport some angst-ridden woman regaled us about how she had crossed her legs for a long time, scared of going in in case it triggered one of her 'attacks'. Everyone looked at her witheringly.
I wanted to ask her - if you are so susceptible to 'attacks' caused by pollution why have you voluntarily put yourself on an aeroplane to travel for five hours - and on at least two previous occasions, to my knowledge, for eight hours to Varadero and Cancun. I wanted to ask her how she intended getting home from Gatwick. I suspected strongly it would almost certainly be by car.
Last night I wanted to tell the woman in the fur coat that she was an ignorant illbred moron, and to enquire whether she drove a car, what was her mileage, how big was the engine.
The thing is, though, I was brought up, not dragged up, and, therefore, I find it goes again the grain to be confrontational. Unless directly confronted. If this cow has a problem with smoking in the Barbican, perhaps she could complain to the management. The trouble is Management (in general, I mean, I know nothing about the Barbican management) tend to respond to the one complaint without weighing all the non-complainants in the balance.
I don't want to rehash all the arguments about smoking in public places, but I do think that there is an element of people, or perhaps an element in all people, which is highly critical of other people's behaviour without being at all critical of their own.
