Late one evening, late last year, my girlfriend and I were in my local pub. We got into one of those fleeting, spontaneous conversations with a man standing at the bar. He was very affable and chatty, merry but not drunk, and, as we noted to each other with a sideways grin and a nudge, looked as though he had come straight from a 1970s-themed fancy dress party.
He was quite young, possibly mid-30s, wore a burgundy turtleneck sweater, and had his hair swept back in a sort of wavy blonde mop that you really never see any more. I'm not going to say the words 'All Spice' but he was wearing an after shave or eau de toilette which even smelled a little retro, if that's possible. If he had been at a fancy dress party, he deserves full credit for getting into character.
(Perhaps a side-note, but worth mentioning I think: I go in to this pub often; too often for my own good. But the point is, I had never seen this man in there before, nor have I seen him there since, and this was a good eight or nine months ago. Of course, there are lots of possible explanations for this; he could have been from out-of-town, or overseas, but he definitely spoke with an English accent.)
When for a brief moment the man stepped out of earshot, one of us, I forget who, leaned into the other and sniggered something along the lines of "is this guy a time-traveller or something??"...
Which would have been the end of a rather cruel and snobby joke about fashion sense. But then all of a sudden in the middle of this very busy bar, without hesitation, he lit up a cigarette. It was only when one of us blurted out "You can't smoke in here!!" that he dashed outside to the street.
Now a lot of smokers had a few slips, through force of habit, in the first few days and weeks of the 2007 ban. But I believe even the most hard-handed smokers have learnt by now, after well over a decade, that you have to go outside for a cig.
Surely the first rule when visiting another dimension, is to brush up on the (up-to-date) local laws?
