IN a nameless supermarket in a nameless city beginning with L ten miles south of Belfast, Squinter is ambling towards the bread section when he spots a Secret Service agent.
She’s getting on a bit for the Presidential protection unit, and as a fuller-figured woman she wasn’t going to be jogging beside Donald Trump’s limo if he ventured North on his visit to Ireland. But she was unmistakably Secret Service. Had to be.
She lifted up the collar of her blouse, dropped her chin to her chest and was clearly speaking via a wire to other agents either in the building or back at base. As Squinter decided whether to plump for a 50/50 loaf or a wholemeal job, she did it again. When he made his loaf choice and went in search of a Veda she did it again. And by the time he arrived at the bagels she was again in earnest and surreptitious conversation with her highly-trained colleagues.
As Squinter drew closer, he saw something even stranger than the Secret Service in a supermarket: Wisps of white smoke were making their way slowly and languourously up her neck and into her hair. Had her mic and wire caught fire? Had a Russian lurking behind the potato bread and pancakes assailed her with a chemical agent?
The truth, when it revealed itself, was disappointingly dull. In putting her hand beneath her coat and moving the collar of her blouse, the woman wasn’t accessing state-of-the-art micro-radio equipment. What she was accessing was the strap of her bra. Why?
Because tucked between the strap and her shoulder was a vape, and in ducking her head she wasn’t communicating the movements of a potential assassin, she was taking short puffs of what now smelt like some order of watermelon-flavoured e-liquid.
It was an impressive piece of subterfuge, guaranteed to avoid the attention of shop staff.
But what impressed even more was that she was blowing the vape smoke back from where it came, and so effective was this in hiding the vapour that the small tendrils were only visible to someone both close and paying attention. Someone like Squinter.
The incident underlined one of the biggest – or perhaps the biggest – drawbacks to vaping instead of smoking: The phenomenon of utterly incessant, non-stop vaping.
Back when everybody smoked, chain-smokers were rare and in a tobacco league of their own: Unusual, exotic. But if Squinter were to hazard a guess from his own by now extensive observations of vapers, he’d say that chain-vaping is incredibly common. At a football match recently a bloke in front of him vaped non-stop for two-and-a-half hours, with the prevailing wind ensuring that every dense vapour trail wafted straight back into Squinter’s gub. In pubs and clubs Squinter has been in the company of vapers who have vaped constantly for three and even four hours. It’s almost impressive.
Now Squinter’s not going to argue with what appears to be a scientific consensus that sucking in flavoured battery smoke is less deadly than sucking in tobacco smoke. But the same scientific consensus tells us that vaping has its own health issues – and if those health issues are less serious than those connected to tobacco, don’t they become more serious when vapers vape a hell of a lot more than smokers smoke?
The smoking ban in pubs and clubs has been widely extended to include vaping products, but that ban seems to Squinter to be honoured more in the breach than the observance; to such an extent that whereas in recent years vapers would puff secretly and blow the smoke under the table, open vaping seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance in the city’s watering holes.
Smoking in shops was never a thing, was it? Even in the 30s and 40s, when people smoked to cure coughs, there seemed to be an unspoken ban on blowing smoke over the food and the clothes. But vaping in shops? That’s something altogether new and unexpected. And it’s no longer a secret.
The ancient Kraft of getting away with it is alive and well in Florida
1/6 Let me tell you of the guy for whom Ed Sheeran ditched his longtime pal Macklemore.
Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and of their stadium (where Sheeran/Macklemore were to play), was arrested in Feb. 2019 over visits to a Florida massage parlour.
2/6 The arrest was part of an anti-sex trafficking operation in which Kraft was filmed on several occasions getting hand jobs from women living on the premises and forced to work 15hr days. The Epstein Files reveal that next day the late paedophile set to work on Kraft's behalf.
3/6 Epstein set up for Kraft a guy by the name of Jack Goldberger, who, with celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, obtained Epstein's notorious 2008 sweetheart deal on his sex trafficking ring charges, also in Florida. The 'non-prosecution' deal got Epstein just 13 months in jail.
4/6 I say jail, but Epstein was allowed to spend the bulk of his time working in his office. The US Attorney in the Epstein case, Alex Acosta, resigned as Donald Trump's Labour Secretary in 2019 after he was found to have acted illegally in cutting the favourable Epstein deal.
5/6 The case was particularly problematic for Kraft because the NFL imposes onerous morality requirements on team owners. Nil desperandum. The judge agreed to a defence request to suppress the Kraft handjob footage. The case was dropped and the court ordered the Kraft sex videos destroyed. And they were. Finito.
6/6 Kraft flashing his Super Bowl ring at cops failed, but Epstein's guy Goldberger didn't. Four months after his arrest, Kraft was in Jerusalem to accept the $1m Genesis Prize, known as 'Israel's Nobel', from... Benjamin Netanyahu.
So, yeah. Let's listen to this guy on morality.
