It’s quite common for incoming Prime Ministers to move the pictures around. It’s a total non-story, but it is a smart bit of politics by Starmer, who still seems to be regarded as being to the right of Oswald Mosley by many on the left.
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Have never noticed them in Europe, but in Asia and the Middle East they are a big thing. Teipai AIrport in particular has great ones that are open air, so the smoke dispates really quickly
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Hope you’re feeling better!
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The biggest reason why people have stopped going to pubs is that nobody has any money and the prices have skyrocketed.
If the pub industry wants to protect itself it needs to look at the insane prices pubs charge.
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Complaining about smoking while, in the same post, mentioning travelling by aeroplane?
The irony.
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Business trip, unfortunately. I have yet to convince management of the joy of ships.
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Haven’t they heard of Skype, Teams, etc? 
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They have now! I was actually trying to remember when that flight to CdG was and it must have been 2018 because I was carrying data on a diplomatic passport.
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You used to be a diplomat? I suppose that now you’re down the laundromat.
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I used to be a civil servant, mostly involved with data and stats. On occasion, I had to carry data around on disks, tapes or whatever the format was at the time. In theory, this was never meant to leave your person so I had a diplomatic stamp on my passport so that I could go through security checks without having to be parted from my possessions (and data).
Contrary to what some would have you believe, UK government does take data security seriously (although by comparison Germany is off the scale). You can imagine my shock when it transpired that the UK government were actually conducting all their business via Whatsapp.
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Pretty much it. Brewery’s have screwed themselves. Sister in law used to run pubs. As soon as she made any money the rent went up.
Also super markets who can sell beer at costs that pubs cant compete with.
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For the past 2/3 years we’ve had minimum pricing in the supermarkets in Ireland where the price of beer went up by at least 70% per can and pubs are still struggling to get customers in, while price of the pint has also gone up.
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Dang, that feels like pub culture has been killed off
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The kids don’t drink the way we did.It’s too expensive for them and they have more things to do.
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Also, more and more younger people are going teetotal.
I actually honestly often love a good mocktail better than a cocktail.
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Fixed!
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About that…
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There are things cheaper than drugs you can do to get you out of your head.
Oh definitely, mine was merely observing that the cost and availability of drugs is massively different to when I was growing up and just started drinking and going out.
These days, you could easily spend more on booze than on coke, but not have to much difference in how messed up you get. In the 90’s a massive night on the piss would have still been cheaper for most people. And that is if you managed to find someone selling it.
These days you don’t even have to go looking as more often than not, people will just walk straight up and offer it - at least in London
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