The good news is that a Smoker's Permit will cost only £10. The bad news is how you apply for it
You still have freedom of choice. Provided you're carrying a valid Freedom of Choice Permit
Morning, citizen! The grandly titled Julian Le Grand, chairman of a ministerial advisory board called Health England, has a humdinger of an idea for you: smoking permits. He proposes a ban on the sale of tobacco to anyone who can't flash a licence at the cashier.
Good news for smokers: Le Grand reckons said licence should cost only £10. Bad news: he wants to make the application process as deliberately complex as possible. You'd have to fill out a lengthy form, attaching a photograph, proof of age and a fee, and send it all to a central Smoker's Permit processing centre and wait for your licence to come back, by which point, let's face it, you would have probably died. Oh, and the licence expires after a year, so you have to apply all over again each time it runs out.
Why leave it there? Why not make it expire every 24 hours, so you have to reapply each morning? Or include a Sudoku on the application form? Or force the tobacco companies to sell cigarettes inside complicated Japanese puzzle boxes? Or change the name of the brands each week, without publicising the change, while simultaneously making it illegal for a shop to sell you anything you haven't asked for by name, so you have to stand at the counter fishing for codewords for an hour?
Or here's a good one, Julian: make it a requirement for smokers to walk around with a broomhandle stuck through their sleeves, running behind the neck, so their arms are permanently splayed out, like a scarecrow's. To spark up under those conditions, they'd have to work together in pairs, flailing around in the outdoor smoking area like something out of It's a Knockout.
His paper, incidentally, also proposes "incentives for large companies to provide a daily 'exercise hour' for staff". Welcome to your future life: having struggled into work suffering withdrawal pangs because today's smoking licence didn't arrive in the post, you're forced to spend 60 minutes doing squat-thrusts in the car park. And each time you start crying, a man in a helmet comes round to gently remind you that it's all for your own good. Through a loudhailer.
If that sounds like a nightmare, don't worry: you can still wriggle out of the squat-thrusts, provided you're carrying a valid Laziness Licence, whose application process involves climbing a ladder to reach the forms (stored at the top of a 200ft crane), ticking 900 boxes with a 7kg pencil, and finally posting it into a motorised mailbox that persistently runs away from you at speeds of up to 25mph. In other words, you still have freedom of choice. Provided you're carrying a valid Freedom of Choice Permit, that is.
Getting your hands on a Freedom of Choice Permit is pretty straightforward. The application form requires only your name and signature. Admittedly, you have to deliver it in person to the Freedom of Choice Licensing Agency, which is open only between 4.15am and 4.18am, and is based in an unmarked office in the Falklands, but nevertheless, thousands have already applied, if the queues are anything to go by. The current waiting time is a mere nine weeks, although you'd be advised to get there early and guard your place in line because there have been reports of disturbances.
Anyway, once you've got your Freedom of Choice Permit, you're free to do as you please, within reason, provided you notify the Central Scrutiniser six days in advance of any unapproved activity, quoting your 96-digit Freedom of Choice Permit code in full, which isn't printed anywhere on the permit itself, but is given to you once and only once, whispered quickly into your ear at the desk in the Falklands, by a man standing beneath a loudspeaker barking out other numbers at random.
The permit itself, incidentally, is shaped like a broomhandle, and is designed to be threaded through your sleeves at all times.
If you couldn't be bothered with all that, you will just have to do as you're told, which isn't that bad, to be honest. There's a compulsory exercise hour or five, and an approved list of foodstuffs, but that's about it. You will still have at least 10 minutes a day to do as you please, although we've just banned violent videogames, which are bad for your head, and there are one or two ideologies we'd rather you didn't discuss with friends or on the internet, which is why we're not issuing any Freedom of Speech Permits for the time being - although if you'd like to be notified when they're available, simply book yourself into one of our underground holding pens and remain there until your name is called, or not called, or time itself comes to an end. Whichever takes the longest.
Once upon a time, in between scrawling allegorical fables about lions and wardrobes, CS Lewis said something prescient. "Of all tyrannies," he wrote, "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
You can nod your head in agreement if you like. Once you've got your Nodding Permit. Don't want you straining your neck, now, do we, citizen?
· This week Charlie read the excellent Flat Earth News by Nick Davies: "I am now convinced that literally everything in the world is a stinking lie, to the point where I am compiling a list of things I know are definitely, certainly real, just to maintain my own sanity. The list currently reads: '1. Eggs. 2. Cats. 3. Don't know.'"
Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Monday February 18 2008
guardian.co.uk
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
