Ghost town

Back to Wageningen - but it's not quite the town I am familiar with. The car parks and streets are empty and people in the shops are queueing up to serve you. My e-mail in-box is taking in about 60% less messages than usual. The Dutch holiday season has begun. Good time to book appointments with opticians and barbers. Not a good time to maintain social contacts - most of the social networks I belong to have closed down for two months.

Several of my acquaintances / friends (real time and virtual) are making rumbling noises about it being time for them to move on (leave the NL). I sympathise with their situation. Being single in a foreign culture is twice as hard work. Those I know with kids just put their noses to the grindstone and get on with it.

For my part I have spent half of the past two months in the "motherland". I fully expect that to be 25% of my time for the remainder of the year. Questions of holidays (I was looking at a trekking holiday in the Pyrenees or Croatia) are just not even on the agenda for reasons of time and money. I'm just trying to make the best of it.

Since I was away the Dutch government introduced the ban on smoking in bars and cafes. My local squat pub (which I haven't visited for about three months) has a notice posted on its window, regretting the fact that smoking tobacco is no longer permitted in their premises. They were hoping that as a private members club they might get away with it (you can still smoke pure grass there though). But the latest wave of health fascism (and this is not rhetorical - the German Nazi party were the first government to seek to ban smoking in public places) takes no prisoners. Why is it that our governments - who purport to believe in the market and freedom of choice - impose these things on their citizenry? I fully support the possibility of smoke free bars. I would just choose not to patronise them. In the UK the Wetherspoons chain went smoke free about three years ago - and found their custom down by 20%. In England everywhere you go now you see boarded-up pubs for sale. A combination of the locals not wanting to go any more, combined with their huge resale estate value.

This is nanny state writ large. And it doesn't work. Cocaine is illegal in the UK (and I think everywhere else in the EU). On my last visit to the UK I read that health and safety inspectors in Chelsea and Kensington - probably the UK's richest and most trend setting municipality - found traces of cocaine in the toilets of 98% of licenced premises that they surveyed. Prohibition doesn't work. I recognise that excessive cocaine, tobacco or marijuana use are not good things for society - or the individuals concerned. But how can governments control or cajole people, without infringing on their civil liberties or creating an underworld that feeds and grows prosperous on the very things the state is trying to control?

Answers on a postcard please