I was having lunch at one of my favourite restaurants, Pronto in the Colony Centre in Craighall, when the delightful Natasha who runs the place with such charm and efficiency came up and asked “what on earth am I going to do about these new smoking regulations?”

Now I do know that new legislation has been passed which makes it illegal for me to smoke a cigarette in my car when there is a twelve year old also in the car. It’s not illegal to smoke with a thirteen year old in the car however which shows what an ass the law is sometimes. Obviously something miraculous happens to a child’s lungs when they become thirteen which enables them to cope with passive cigarette smoke. And supposing it’s the twelve year old kid who lights up? Am I still in trouble?

Fortunately I don’t travel around with pre pubescent kids in my car very often so I can smoke like a chimney if I want to. Except I can’t exhale the smoke through my window if I am at an intersection where illegal immigrants are trying to sell me pirated DVD’s and white coat hangers. The reason for this is that this becomes a place of work and so by exhaling my smoke one of the coat hanger salesmen might inhale it, become shockingly ill as a result and then sue me for damages. I’m not sure about this but I don’t think I can smoke at home on the day the maid comes for the very same reason. My home becomes a place of work and, unless the maid is a smoker herself, I could be the cause of future pulmonary problems. I have to go outside…..right outside.

I visited a bank once that had a room set aside for those employees that smoked. It was a depressingly gloomy room full of cigarette haze, overflowing ashtrays and lots of happy but unhealthy looking people inhaling as much smoke as they could before they had to go back to their desks. These were the bank’s serious smokers and I reckon you could probably have got lung cancer by just sitting next to them and inhaling the smoke fumes from their clothes. Then political correctness hit the bank and the smoking room was closed thus depriving the smokers of their rights. Tough. They then had to leave the building and so you would see little huddles of smokers standing on a freezing cold July day outside the revolving doors of the bank with a mass of stamped out cigarette butts at their feet. Firstly, this doesn’t give a good impression to customers and, secondly, surely the time it takes for a smoker to leave his or her desk, get the lift down to the ground floor, go through security, stand at the front door for a cigarette and then come all the way back to the desk is a colossal waste of time and money. The smoking room was a much more cost effective idea. But now the smokers are no longer allowed to huddle outside a building. They have to move far away from the doorway into a space where their filthy exhalations won’t harm anybody.

In the city of Johannesburg this is difficult because as you move too far away from your doorway you move into the space of somebody else’s doorway. If you work at Standard Bank’s head office for example the only place you can smoke is in the middle of Simmonds Street, with two lines of cars and taxis whizzing by on either side of you. The logic of the legislators is clear……either give up smoking of die of lead fume inhalation or get hit by a taxi.

Natasha’s dilemma is more serious. She runs a bustling restaurant and some patrons want to smoke. I’ve been known to enjoy the occasional cigar there with the legendary Stephen Mulholland. Prior to this new legislation smokers could sit at tables outside and smoke as much as they wanted. Admittedly this prejudiced non smokers who wanted an outside table in summer but you can’t please everyone. Now, the smokers can’t sit outside because there is a roof over the area so it becomes an “enclosed space”. The only table you could possibly smoke at is one that isn’t placed under any form of roof. It could even be argued that an umbrella constitutes an “enclosed space”. So you either have to sit in the sun or the rain if you want an intercourse cigarette. This is an absurd situation but it’s made more so because the onus is on the owner of the restaurant to make sure that nobody smokes. The fine for a contravention is R50000. You can beat somebody up in a fit of road rage and it will cost you much less.

So imagine what happens if the restaurant owner is busy in the kitchen and somebody innocently lights up. Worse still, what happens if I want to close a restaurant that has moved onto my turf and is taking my business away? Simple….I send people there to smoke having first alerted the elite Cigarette Squad. A couple of R50000 fines and my competition is dead in the water. This is a law so absurd, so difficult to enforce fairly and so open to abuse that it automatically qualifies as a fine example of lousy legislation. Personally, I don’t like to smoke in a restaurant and I don’t like people smoking near me. But I do want to smoke after the meal while I enjoy a coffee and a grappa. Quite how we are going to explain this bizarre state of affairs to the throngs of foreign visitors who are expected to descend on us for World Cup 2010 I don’t know. Or maybe we’re only allowing in non smoking footie fans.