Without smoking in films, I’ll lose the plot
Ifind that smoking in films, or on TV, can be a help in following the plot. In a murder mystery, for example, a cigarette can be a handy pointer to a character who is a wrong’un. Now the World Health Organisation says all films containing smoking should have an 18 certificate. It will be a bad day for viewers like me when nobody is allowed to light up in any film or on TV – which is surely what the WHO would like.
As things are, don’t trust anyone inhaling deeply – except, of course, if it’s a Fifties detective in a trilby. And an overflowing ashtray is a clear indicator of an obsessive loner. Keep your eye on him. A pipe smoker was once a decent sort, but not any more. Don’t trust that pipe-smoking vicar further than you could throw his lectern. He also has a letter opener in his desk drawer.
Letter openers are for stabbing people.
Smoking aside, be wary of any female vicar; they specialise in crimes of passion. When the elegant lady in the smart drawing room pours a drink from a cut-glass decanter and says, “Well, you won’t mind if I have one, Inspector,” that cut-glass decanter tells you that she is having an affair, probably with the pipe-smoking vicar.
Gravel is a useful indicator. The businesswoman who crunches the gravel fiercely as she pulls out of the drive in her posh car is clearly on her way to blackmail the doctor, who, by the way, is up to his neck in it. Did you notice the way he dropped litter when he tore up the incriminating note? I’m sure you also observed how he casually scribbled a prescription, pushed it across the desk to the obsessive loner and said: “These will help you sleep.” No proper GP prescribes sleeping pills so airily.
Look out for the twist at the end. The body of the obsessive loner is sprawled at the foot of the church tower with a letter-opener in his back, and a man from the WHO pushes through the crowd. “As I thought,” he says. “Death due to smoking.”
The true heroes of our age are the people who work at the Office for National Statistics. They plough on stoically while the rest of us play fast and loose with their decimal points; they grit their teeth as MPs bandy misunderstood snippets of their data.
Imagine what it must be like working for the ONS and never being allowed to make a wild guess or give a ballpark figure. It must hurt to hand over 168 pages of tables of figures and see the person receiving it blatantly turning to the Summary of Findings on page 168.
It’s no joke discussing percentages with a population, 67 per cent of whom don’t understand percentages. (That 67 per cent, by the way, is my own wild guess. Just because I can.)
The subject matter they deal with – crime figures, more crime figures, the depressing state of the economy – must get them down. A recent ONS report was on alcohol-related deaths in the UK in 2014; this is not promising material when you go home to your partner and they ask how your day was.
The only rollicking fun the ONS people get is a census every 10 years. It must be a relief, therefore, to turn their attention to national wellbeing. Their report, just out, finds that people aged 50 to 54 are the most miserable, 65s to 75s are the happiest, and those of us who are 75-79 are pretty cheerful. “They should come and take a look at you sometime,” my wife said when she read this. “I’m perfectly fine,” I said. “I just worry about those poor wretched statisticians.”
It’s surely taking incest too far to conduct a survey about feedback. This happened last week when we were told some slightly interesting things about how we give our verdicts online. You might as well ask people to vote for their favourite opinion pollster or put five market research companies in order of preference.
Or why not ask for feedback on your feedback? Invite the supplier to share his experience of your responses. Was he happy with your ticked boxes? Was “OK” an adequate description of your opinion of your new eezi-squeezi mop? Was he offended when you said no, you were not likely to recommend the eezi-squeezi mop to a friend? Did he understand that, although it was OK and seemed fairly easy to squeeze, you don’t actually have any friends who would want to have a conversation about a mop of any kind?