SNOUTS

I am an occasional smoker.
By which I mean, I never buy them, but if you open a pack of snouts, especially outside a pub two pints in, I'll happily cadge.
I'm not addicted. I'll go for weeks, months, without one. Then if I want one, I'll have one. No one is addicted. It is a myth bust open in Allen Carr's excellent book THE EASY WAY TO STOP SMOKING.
So I am not positioning myself as anti smoking.
But when I go to a client's offices and there is a constant stream of smokers heading out to the outside smoking hutch (now that smoking in any public building is banned) it does make me wonder whether an employer would be justified in paying smokers less than other workers. Five minutes for a fag. Ten fags a day, maybe more. That's an hour or so less a day than other workers. Five hours a week. twenty hours or so a month. 250 hours a year (or 30 and a bit days in old money).

Mmmm. A large cost, for sure.