Open Writing

Thanks to Stella Gibbons and her wonderful, zany, satirical novel ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, we know about demented old Aunt Ada Doom and her oft-repeated lament, ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed.’

The novel was published in 1964. A film version released in 1996 starred Ian McKellen and Joanna Lumley. It is now available on DVD and my computer has a DVD drive, so guess what — I’ve watched the film for the umpteenth time, laughing my silly head off. I’d rather watch it on my TV set but it doesn’t have a DVD drive. So I suffer the discomfort of an office chair, with added cushion, and watch a film on my computer.

The nice thing about that arrangement is that there are no distractions. The film-watching experience in cinemas during my boyhood years was often marred. Smoking was permitted inside cinemas. My father was a luxury smoker — he used his pensioner’s cigarette allowance coupon on an occasional packet of small cigars. He never smoked in a cinema. He showed me how to blow the smoke back at a smoker in an adjacent seat.
Another problem we faced was large ladies’ hats, in the row in front of us. That could be a large lady wearing a hat, or a standard size lady wearing a large hat. Unfortunately, we couldn’t blow them away. A particularly distracting problem, however, was people who insisted on talking while the film was on. I suppose thoughtless people still do that, just as intelligence-disadvantaged people use mobile phones in cinemas and theatres.

The cigarette smoke problem is no longer with us. Smoking in most public venues is now illegal. That’s good. We no longer have to watch people drop their ash into the open freezer sections in the supermarket. Office workers must cower in corners in the open air to have a puff. Conditions apply — some companies ban smoking within a specific distance of the building. Covered shopping precincts are smoke-free, too. Even the under-cover car parking areas are no-smoking zones. Now that one is rather curious.

You aren’t allowed to smoke a cigarette in the car park, but thousands of cars enter and leave throughout the day. If smoking is banned, because of the dangers of passive inhalation of noxious chemicals, shouldn’t cars also be banned? We’re free to inhale the deadly gases emitted by those thousands of cars in an enclosed, roofed area.

Smoking is already banned from restaurants, and will soon be a no-no in pubs, hotels and casinos. That’s not a bad idea. But I wonder when drinking alcohol will be banned in those venues, too? The statistics for death, violence, road accidents, marriage breakdown, child abuse, and many other nasty things, are strongly influenced by alcohol. The cost to society is enormous. The medical profession seems to hide behind the idea that a little alcohol is good for you, in spite of the fact that the theory came from unreliable research and a very large international research project has shown it to be flawed.

If we’re going to ban smoking, cars and alcohol, we should also ban people from using fans in public places. I mean old-fashioned hand-held fans, beautiful though they are to see, feel and use. Fifty years ago we had a remarkable little Art Cinema in Harare, then called Salisbury. If you wanted to see a risqué French romance or a bawdy Italian classic, you went outside the main city area, into a side street, and relished the experience at the Liberty cinema.

There was a major distraction. In the absence of air-conditioning, and in sub-tropical heat, ladies used fans. If the fan was one of those delicate artistic affairs with bone or ivory or even high-grade plastic ribs, it went click, click,click, click, while it was being used. Take it from me, that was more maddening than the combined effects of cigarette smoke and large hats.

The fans were possibly as mind-crippling as what Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed when she was a little girl, and if you want to know more about what it was you’ll just have to read the novel or watch the DVD, won’t you?

© Copyright 2006 Brian Barratt