Huddles

Perhaps my favourite shop in Sheffield is just off Chesterfield Road near to the Heeley railway bridge. It's called Langton's Antiques Emporium. Here we are not talking about highly-polished catalogue stuff that belongs in the homes of the hoity toity but about bric-a-brac and curiosities ranging from old beer tankards and badgers' heads to Victorian fireplaces and "Eagle" comics. You never know what you might find in Langton's. For the curious and the openly nostalgic, Langton's is an Aladdin's cave - more like a museum than a shop.

Well the other day, I took our son Ian for breakfast in the little workaday cafe that is also housed in the emporium. Afterwards, Ian and I had a nose about Langton's latest junk and there in a glass case we saw some second world war memorabilia - including, shiveringly, a grubby little white arm band with a blue star of David embroidered upon it and the label "Juden". Momentarily, you wonder who might have worn it and how it came to be in this glass case. As well as being a symbol of Nazi evil, it was an emblem of the rejected, outcasts, people who were considered to be less than human.

This brings me to the title of this post - "Huddles" - and sorry for my odd mental linkage - I'm not thinking about huddles of Jews in the streets of Warsaw or Prague but about Britain's remaining smokers. You must have seen them - outside offices, shops, bars and even hospitals - huddles of smokers looking, well, like modern-day outcasts, the rejected ones. They have furtive body language and seem self-conscious as you pass by. One arm will often be crossed over the chest as they suck on the evil weed, billows of acrid blue-grey smoke rising above their pasty heads. I want to go over and yell - "Stop this stupidity and get inside! Give the horrible things up!"

I hate it when I have to enter a building that is being guarded by a smokers' huddle. It's best to take a deep breath of unpolluted air and then dash through, taking care not to catch the smokers' eyes. You never know how these odorous outcasts might react. In fact, returning to those WWII armbands, I think new dayglo orange armbands should be mandatory for all smokers complete with the embroidered label "Smoker" and a suitable symbol - maybe a little chimney belching smoke or a cigarette being stubbed in an ashtray or perhaps, to keep it simpler, the cutesy swastika and cancer stick design shown above. Absolutely no apology to any smoker who may be coughing over this post. Give em up!