Sun, 27 May 2012
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They were there this morning. They're there every morning.
As I push the son and heir in his pram past the gates of the school near his kindergarten pupils are filing into the school gate.
And there, outside the gate, stands a group of youngsters, about 12 or 13 years old, enjoying that last cigarette before facing the first class.
Going on about smoking in Germany is one of the time-honoured activities of people from less carcinogenic lands.
But even for Germans isn't it a bit disappointing to see the smoking circle at the school gate.
And as the pre-teens puff and chat each morning, the younger kids gambol merrily past.
Now, to my jaundiced view the smokers may look like a lot of louts with jeans eight sizes too big.
But I remember just enough of childhood to recall that the 'big kids' were like gods. They were the embodiment of cool. I don't think role models had been invented then, but that's what they surely were.
We didn't want to be like our parents, and certainly not like our teachers. We had our heroes, but of the people who we actually saw the most impressive were the big kids in school.
Now if I were marketing Marlboros or Lucky Strike I can imagine no better form of advertising than to have the cool kids in a school stand at the gate each morning, smoking my product.
It would do my corporate heart good to see the admiring glances from the very young as they passed.
"We've got 'em by 12 - and we've got 'em on side by eight," I might quietly think.
Now some hypocrisy has to be admitted in this analysis as, in that Dickensian past which was my schooling, many children smoked, myself included.
But we did it behind toilets and change sheds, at least reducing our prominence and appeal as role models.
Not that the difficulties reduced out devotion to the weed.
I remember on one occasion when my best friend was knocked out playing football. As he was carried off in a concussed delirium he could be heard moaning: "I wanna smoke...I wanna smoke."
Smoking is attractive to many kids as they try to understand how to make the leap from child to adult, and some will always smoke.
But there are ways of reducing the number that choose cigarettes as their means of showing they are growing up, as many countries have demonstrated.
And one of those ways is definitely not to have a powerful cigarette advertisement running at the school gate every morning.
Marius Benson
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