The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #66221   Message #1097435
Posted By: GUEST,Bill Kennedy
20-Jan-04 - 04:41 PM
Thread Name: Should our folk club be non smoking?
Subject: RE: Should our folk club be non smoking?
Don't know if any of you have, or remember, Fintan Vallely's 'Timber,
Concert Flute Tutor' from 1986, but he makes some statements about smoke and drink that are quite effective in thier non-judgemental, understated way. As to smoking, (under a great photo of a nun in habit with a fag hanging off her lip like an auto mechanic working on an engine, and all of us who smoke or have smoked can feel the smoke against our cheek and curling into our left eye. Some jobs almost required the cig for proper completion) he says:

SMOKING AND FLUTE PLAYING

"If you play music and smoke, then you might well be in a worse state than those who simply smoke, for you're going to find yourself in smoky atmosphere more often. If you play the flute it's worse again. There are of course no statistics available since flute players are a voiceless minority.
    Cigarettes seem to be handy for those boring interludes between tunes when you either don't know the other players, or have nothing to say to them. They also help cloud the atmosphere to enhance the onset of developing divil-me-caredness. But it must be presumed that smoking is particularly dangerous to flute players: We (in Ireland) seem to be condemned to do most of our playing in sealed beauty-board boxes filled with smoke. We (flute players) are the only people in the session environment taxing our lungs to the same extent as long-distance runners.
But while runners do their thing in the fresh air, we are filling every available scrap of our distended lung-tissues with smoke deposits. Meanwhile, the non-flute playing classes are happily shallow-breathing in as little as perhaps a third of it what we do. Presumably without ever lighting a cigarette we could already be shortening our lives dramatically?"

just a simple statement of the facts, and probably a nudge to flute players to give up smoking since they get enough by just breathing, not a lecture or sermon, and no call to action. well stated, Fintan!