… Paris has apparently decided that children need protection
quips
Stephen Clarke as the British expatriate gets ready to tell us about the latest PC stunt to emerge from the French capital's town hall.
In a new one-year experiment, smoking is to be banned in children’s
playgrounds in public parks. Personally I have always been against
cigarettes for toddlers, but this ban apparently includes parents, too.
So far, there will be no fines for offenders, just warnings from park
keepers, which probably means that smoking will go on unabated. 
After
that, if fines are introduced, the scenes we see outside office
buildings all over Europe will be repeated in parks – gaggles of parents
and babysitters standing just outside the playground, getting their hit
of nicotine before heading back into the exclusion zone. They’ll
probably have to start communicating with their distant kids by phone,
or by shouting. Time to buy shares in toddler-friendly telephones and
cough pastilles.
It will almost certainly become more common to see Parisian parents
smoking while pushing buggies, too, taking advantage of the journey to
and from the playground. Another business opportunity – clip-on ashtrays
for prams.
