Smoking and snoring

This was a collaborative discussion in a village in Indonesian Borneo, where the community was jointly deciding on the sanctions that would be meted out to people who violated the rules of the community forest that the people manage (violations such as logging, grazing cattle, hunting etc.)

It was all in Indonesian and I can understand very little. Therefore my mind got to wondering about all sorts of random things, mainly smoking. Here, virtually all men smoke like trains; usually clove infused cigarettes that are not unpleasant. But everything is usually done through a foggy haze. My pregnant colleague Ema was facilitating this meeting, and I just kept thinking that she was having smoke blown in her face for about 6 hours, and it was just accepted by all. Imagine the outrage in the UK if a pregnant woman had smoke blown in her face by someone - it would probably be classified as ABH. Mind you I am always staggered by people in the UK, with the greater knowledge of health implications that we are provided with there, that people ignore those health warnings and just light up.

Jesus, it's high up on this horse.

I'll get down.

For my sanctimonious thoughts about UK smokers I was repaid a thousand fold that night when sharing a hard wooden floor with two colleagues. The snoring I had to endure from both was collectively the worst I've faced in my life. For someone who is a poor sleeper anyway, I had to try and time getting to sleep with the approximately 2% of the time when neither of them was snoring. One snorer sounded like a mixture of an erratic whimpering dog and a whale making blowhole noises. The other was a pure steam train crashing through the building, making the wooden slats beneath us all vibrate. Ironically to drown out the blowhole, before he went to sleep the steam train had been listening to the music of Edith Piaf and Lucy Spraggan (of X Factor UK...- is it appropriate to add the word 'fame' here??).

I passed out from the fatigue of listening at 4am.

Edith got it wrong. I did regret the earlier bemoaning of smokers...