If the tables were turned

“You can’t drink that in here mate!” I turned in my chair and looked up at the barman through the haze.  “Did you not see the signs?”

Of course I’d seen them; you could hardly miss them as they were all over the place.  A glass of beer, black and white like a pint of Guinness but in a red circle and with a diagonal red line through it.  They were everywhere, on the windows, on the doors and on the tables.  They were even in shop windows and on the buses and on school buildings, places where you would never have any intention of having a drink.

“You’ll have to take it outside.”  I shrugged my shoulders and pulled hard on a cigarette, taking the smoke deep down into my lungs before letting it out slowly through my nostrils.  It felt good.  Why can’t we just have a quiet drink whilst having a smoke?  It’s not been the same since they stuck their noses into everything and changed the law?  I stubbed my butt out in the overflowing ashtray, picked up my vodka and tonic and made my way to the door.

Outside it was dark and there was a cold wind.  I pulled up the collar on my jacket and joined my fellow drinkers in the square that had been painted on the surface of the car park, a discrete distance from the entrance to the pub.  To add insult to injury the words ‘Drinking Area’ had been written on the wall nearby, as if we needed to be reminded.  Two words that marked us out and ostracised us from society. 

There were half a dozen, each with a glass in their hands, hardened by drink and now hardened by the elements.  Some of the other places nearby had put up a shelter for the convenience of their paying customers but there was no such luxury here.  It had been alright in the summer months, bearable when the sun stayed up late and when it was pleasant to have a drink outside but now in the middle of winter the drinking laws were really testing our resolve.

I nodded in recognition to a couple I knew as I joined the group, a nod of understanding, a nod of complicity, a nod of resignation and we stood like penguins in a zoo with our backs to the wind, ground down and beaten by the tide of public opinion and intolerance that was against us.  We’d given up, there was no fight left in us and the war was lost.  I thought how times had changed in just a few short months and I tried to imagine what it would be like if the tables had been turned?

I downed the last and shivered as the ice caught my teeth.  I made my way back indoors, back into the warmth, back into the thick atmosphere and sat back down in the chair that I had vacated.  I tapped a cigarette out of its box, placed it between my lips and sparked up the lighter.