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From the first moment a limp hand is extended to shake yours, the minute you set gaze upon the simpering smile (faker than a tan in Stockport), you know the following interminable collection of minutes will pass with your mind trying to heft itself from your skull and go play in a field with bunnies.

And so it began: “Thank you for coming in and seeing us today ”

It’s not like I had any choice in that matter; I received a letter demanding my presence. It could have been a bank manager – if they existed anymore. It could have been a person dressed up as a police wanting to see my documents or have me explain why I was hanging around outside Carpet Supacentre at four in the morning. It wasn’t.

As the meeting’s host was enjoying himself, by reading directly from a screen he wouldn’t let anybody else see, I wondered how his appearance would be improved with the aid of a two-foot metal spike. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said to myself as he explained to the table how this meeting was automatically generated by an email complaint, ‘this spike could work for vape shop thieves too.’

My grandma always used to harp on about how the old ways were the best. She’d say that we’d lost touch with true values and society was descending into a moral abyss, and that her deity would smite us all for being heathens. Goodness knows what she used to get up to when she was young because he smote her before me. And I’ve done some nasty stuff. She was right to a point – the point I’m mentally burying in this bloke’s left eye socket as he explains that the estates department wrote the email.

The thing is that the police are now like nurses – you can’t tell which one is genuine because most of them are uniformed unqualified assistants. This isn’t knocking them, we love and respect our emergency services, it’s just that the truth is that there are now only three actual officers in the entire country. There’s Constable Keith in Gosport, Sargent Debbie in Luton and Chief Inspector Clive in Stoke (but he’s off on the sick). The rest of the police are civilians and cardboard cut-outs; they can’t solve your crime no matter how much they want to (although the clear-up rate from the cut-out in Kettering’s Poundworld is quite impressive).

So here’s the solution for the vape community: we stop vape crime by adopting the old ways the bloody Dark Ages old ways popularised in Game of Thrones: pits with spikes, stakes with heads on, iron maidens, hot pokers and dungeons. Dank, rank dungeons.

And if any owner fancies testing out their new theft deterrents I know of a chap who has just wasted 43 of the longest minutes of my life.

*Stealthvape does not advocate physical violence and has replaced the writer of this article with a gerbil.

Wander up to a friendly neighbourhood vape store. Dead skin cells and small twigs lie across the shelves, shelves that once groaned under the weight of 5ml Taifuns and those things you needed res/nores wire for. I wish I could remember the name because it was a great vape when it worked. Oh yes, when it worked. When, after creating thirty minutes worth of electrical shorts and dumping two tankful’s of juice over the table. But now nothing works because this is the vaping equivalent of a Mad Max movie.

Sure, there are 10ml bottles. Somewhere. Well, we’ve been told they exist, but now they are the same size as Jimmy Krankie riding on a subatomic particle these new containers aren’t the easiest thing to see with the naked eye.

There used to be a time when people desperately hunted out eliquid suppliers. During this time, contact details would be traded by personal messages with the gravitas that accompanied the stealing of trade secrets. Waiting lists would be created for the release of a batch of juice, if your face didn’t fit then you went without. Now there’ll be shady blokes hanging around town centres or popping into pubs. “Psst. Oi mate, fancy buying some *wink* juice? I can do you a good deal on some large tanks n’all.”

The new tiny juice bottles were chosen by politicians because they had spent their collective formative days playing with posh kids’ tea sets. Tiny little cups matching tiny little saucers and tiny little teapots. The TPD was never about health, it was about Linda McAvan recreating her childhood.

You? You’re the little doll from the poor part of the dollhouse. Here’s your cute tiny juice bottle. Now, pour the juice into the atomiser before it evaporates. Damn, where’s that atomiser? It was here a minute ago – but now we have matching tiny ones they seem to have all the presence of a Prime Minister at a televised public debate.

The bottles are tiny, the attys are tiny – everything is tiny. It’s like the content of cheese packets at the supermarket. Once upon a time, they bulged with coagulated curdy goodness, now you open them up and there’s more ziplock or Velcro than the edible product.

So now we are all creations in a Benjamin Tabart morality tale. Only we don’t all live at the top of a ladder surrounded by gold, we are vaping giants clasping our minute equipment and waiting for a new world order to rise up, built of common sense, from this daft TPD landscape.

What is a lie? Are they all the same?

Your partner returns home. He or she has had something done to their hair that makes them resemble the successful splicing of a traffic warden and a sexual predator. Do you:

a)    Tell them it accentuates their cheek bones

b)   Tell them a cap will help smother it until it grows out

c)    Scream something about Hell as you run into a machine with rotating blades

If you answered mostly A’s, then you are a rare gem. If you answered mostly B’s, then you are probably in the pub. If you answered mostly C’s, then you are most likely to be the kind of vaper who likes walks on winter beaches, pulls the wings off flies and find the actions of anti-harm reduction advocates quite reprehensible.

Some scientists are busy producing papers on vaping that we find *ahem* dubious. Many will be quick to point fingers and accuse those involved of having a cosy relationship with pharmaceutical companies. Hang on, says the Association for Science and Health (ACSH) – be wary of being a member of the “hyperpartisan ‘Follow the money’!” gang, it says. Or rather, as it writes: “in science (as in life), it is best to assume that people are well intentioned, until there is sufficient reason to believe otherwise. In law, we call this “innocent until proven guilty,” and on the Internet, we call this Hanlon’s Razor”.

The ACSH reckon there are five scenarios for some of the ropey stuff we see:

1. They screwed up

2. The data is right, but the conclusions are wrong

3. The [well intentioned] scientists don’t know what they’re doing

4. The scientists are pushing an agenda

5. The scientists are committing fraud

So, is it possible to apply Hanlon’s Razor to Doctor Ninad Katdare?

Katdare wrote an article for the Huffington Post titled “Why tobacco is never safe – not even in an e-Cigarette or hookah”. It’s not a scientific paper, and the Huffington Post is not a journal of repute, but the doctor is meant to be a man of science. If he is then, when he presented his arguments, did he screw up? Did he not know what he was doing? Or was he committing fraud and pushing an agenda?

If you go and read the piece, and we don’t recommend it, he states that vaping is just another form of tobacco use, “implicated in causing asthma, coronary artery disease along with lung cancer.”

If we’re going to be honest, I’ll start – I hid the goal posts in my chest of drawers. Now it’s your go, Doctor Katdare

President image – https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/1242839-i-cannot-tell-a-lie

Stories like this one carried in the Burton Mail exemplify how the dead-eyed, light-fingered menace stalks our streets. Well, maybe “stalk” is the wrong word as it’s far more likely that they shuffle, hunched over unless fuelled with the cheap cider of their choice – then it would be all shouts and randomly falling into street furniture.

People work hard for the things they own, but some folks seem to think they can take whatever they want. “Oh the business has insurance,” they cry. The independent vape market isn’t one where all the business owners are driving around in fancy cars, throwing ten pound notes from the window. Almost all are living on less than minimum wage as they reinvest in making the company better for the customers. Not just that, there has also been a huge cost as a direct result of the Tobacco Products Directive. An insurance claim leads to increased premiums – which mean higher prices for the customer.

But this isn’t even a case of a company claiming after some low-life has made away with a bag of juices. This is about Szilvia the well-liked store manager at Van Dyke Vapes. This is about her personal mobile phone, something that carries precious memories and personal information. Precious memories and personal information that can’t be replaced and are now lost thanks to this gentleman. Precious memories and personal information that are now lost, but are replaced with a personal bill for a new mobile phone.

That’s not fair.

That’s not right.

Maybe you live in Yorkshire? Maybe you know a few other vapers and recognise this chap? Maybe you don’t live in Yorkshire and don’t recognise the gentleman, but sharing it on your social media accounts will help someone else to identify him?

You can contact them at:

https://vandykevapes.com 01756 796662

https://www.facebook.com/vandykevapes/

You can share:

Video footage of the person

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Animated gif

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Let’s show how the vape community can be a force for good – let’s track this guy down.

The process of exchanging opens up learning possibilities, we get to try out things that we would never have done in days gone by. Who reading this can honestly say they didn’t benefit emotionally and spiritually from experimenting with those mail order thongs?

Everybody wins. On one hand you have businesses expanding their order books through encouraging test purchases while on the other millions of people prove that nipple clamps really aren’t for them. But, like a child pulling faces at a Brussels sprout, the important thing is that it was attempted – lessons were learnt, minds changed.

One of the single biggest issues vape faces in 2017 is the collective obstinacy of people like Stanton Glantz. These (almost exclusively) outspoken academic gentlemen like to ignore facts as they rail against something that is 95% safer than smoking. So, the question we asked ourselves was this – how can we get them to question their preconceptions?

Channel 4 was set up to inspire, nurture and stimulate debate. As it strove to become innovative and distinctive, one day a producer said, “Hey, I know what, let’s get men to swap wives”. As most of us don’t live in places were such things take place [nobody has ever touched my motorbike keys] the concept is alien to us.

But swap they did, in a non-sexual sense: The Orchards and the Sinclares, the Seniors and the Jordans, and the Sheriffs and the Wards. Families came together from different ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations and political viewpoints to spend a week in each others company, learn about a different way of living, and then have a good argument.

These academics who hate the notion of harm reduction are just like us: they go to the toilet like we do, they pick their noses when they think nobody is looking and they eat the same foods as us – except in the case of McKee, he seems to have more in common with the porcine inhabitants of farms.

So this is our proposal: we are seeking a number of volunteer vapers to go and spend some time with Simon Chumpman, Stanton Glib, Colin McPiggy and a host of other anti-vape crusaders. Obviously, there’s not chance that they would agree to this so we haven’t asked them. The plan is for a number of vapers to turn up at their front door and push their way in, staying for about a week, then all talking about what went well and what you all learnt from the experience.

It’s an exciting, experimental project and carries the chance that some things could go wrong. For a start, our public health experts might want to run away (we advise taking some string, tape or rope) or call the police. Clearly, we are not going to cover travelling costs or legal representation in fact, we’ll deny ever knowing anything about this if somebody asks. Who’s game?

The process the EU Commission is engaging in is meant to give the illusion of democracy in action. The bottom line is that it wants to tax electronic cigarettes and everything connected with them and, although the outcome might well have been decided behind closed doors, if we can muster up weight of numbers there is the chance we can influence the outcome.

The consultation has been taking place for a number of months but the deadline falls on the 16^th of February – there isn’t very long left to get involved. Jessica Harding, speaking for the New Nicotine Alliance, says: “It would be excellent if consumers could respond. It only takes about 15 minutes to do.”

The forms can appear a little confusing. For anybody struggling with working his or her way through the process, we recommend having a look at the brilliant guide residing on the ViP blog page.

The IG-ED e.V., a consumer’s organisation of German speaking vapers, contends that the issue is coming about because of declining cigarette sales producing less tax revenue for member countries: “The declining tobacco smoking quota is partially due to the electronic vape products which have been on the market for 12 years now. A tax on these products would stop this trend. It is also likely that a considerable number of newcomers would return to the tobacco cigarette.”

“For smokers, the motivation to switch would be significantly lower. This is not necessarily due to the tax, but the fact that a tax is being imposed at all, suggests to the consumer that electronic vape products are just as harmful as smoke tobacco products. Directive 2014/40/EU already leads consumers to be deceived about the actual minimal risks due to the same warning signs as on tobacco products.”

Closer to home, The New Nicotine Alliance believes that “There is no case on principled or practical grounds to apply excise duties to vaping products and other products that offer a much safer alternative to smoking.  The value to health and wellbeing associated with switching from smoking to vaping will exceed any benefits arising from revenue collection.”

“Just as it was with the Tobacco Products Directive, the inclusion of products which do not contain tobacco in the Tobacco Excise Directive is unhelpful and risks creating confusion in the minds of consumers.”

The EU Commission consultation website – here.

It was on one such break this week that I made a discovery. Taking a sip of Lady Grey, I clicked on one of those links you always try to avoid. “Seventeen things you didn’t know about Japan”, it said. One thing they didn’t know about me is that I love Japanese things, and another is that I am always looking for decent ways to procrastinate.

This is where I discovered that while we have milk, dark and white chocolate KitKats, Japan has benefitted from over 300 different flavours. Plus, out of all of those, the most popular one was Soy Sauce.

Other flavours have or do include: baked potato, cough drop, corn, European cheese, green bean, hot Japanese chilli, Miso soup, red potato, rock salt, sake, vegetable juice, and wasabi.

They should have just done an article about the seventeen things I didn’t know about KitKat – like the name being similar to the good luck phrase kitto katsu, meaning “you will surely win”. So, from its launch in 1973, bars have been given as good luck or thank you gifts and embraced by the nation.

But, according to Flavour Boss, one group of people who aren’t winning are non-smokers. Apparently, in their survey, two-thirds of non-smokers are miffed that they don’t get the equivalent of smoking breaks, while 80% of people responding were unhappy that smokers were allowed breaks at all.

It is difficult to argue against the fact that breaks freshen up employees. If it works for car drivers then it seems logical that taking five minutes away from a terminal or desk would do the same for someone beginning to feel a bit jaded. Walking about helps the circulation too, combatting the dangers of a sedentary life.

Many employers state that there’s a cost involved in having people wandering about instead of concentrating on their work – and, to avoid complications, have banned smoking as well as vaping.

But, given the new position taken by the UK government, will employers reconsider allowing vapers to vape in offices and work vehicles? The UK’s war on vaping is pretty much done and dusted (bar a few dissenting voices), the only trouble is whether too much damage has been done to vaping’s reputation over the last few years.

At one point in time, being able to vape at work was one of the main reasons behind people taking it up. Are you still allowed to vape at work? Do you think your employer encourages smokers to switch? Would you eat a wasabi KitKat?

*Japanese KitKat image borrowed from Japan Centre, where you can purchase some wonderful yet incredible Japanese KitKats

Oh, it’s just a smudge on the car’s windscreen. The panic is called off and we all breathe a collective sigh of relief. But then some fool turns on the radio and it’s not tuned to something with music. The air fills with noise about hurricanes and missiles and war and politicians. You can fumble for the central locking but that’s not going to help.

Run, run for home as fast as you can. Don’t let traffic or farmyard animals slow you down, you need to feel the comfort and tranquillity of your little bubble – the happy place where the outside world can not intrude.

You’ve left you door key in the car? You fool. What kind of idiot does something that stupid? You’d better hurry up to come up with a solution because that’s a pair of people in smart clothes walking down the road and they look like they want to give you a copy of something looking suspiciously like the word of a god in a booklet. Or get you to order expensive vegetables, delivered to your door. Or sign you up for window cleaning. Or take out a monthly direct debit, donating spare cash you don’t have to give to animals you can’t cuddle. Quick.

Good plan that was, popping next door is a masterstroke. You can both sit down share a cup of tea and chat about what new juice you’ve tried recently. Oh, and would you look at that? Her husband has only gone and made some wonderful cakes. Phew. A day that started with so much promise suddenly looked like it would be one you’d not forget in a hurry. But it’s all golden now; pick up that mug and sup down the nation’s favourite beverage because there’s nothing more British than a tea

Oh no, simply using the word British has sparked the neighbours off, and their opinions would grace septic tanks and sewage treatment plants better than landing on your delicate ears. Make your excuse to leave the table, any excuse.

Well, I suppose thinking about sewage might make some people want to go to the toilet, but it’s hardly ideal as you are still stuck in the house. Oh you have to be kidding me? Seriously? You’re going to do one of them in somebody else’s home? I don’t care if milk always makes you do that, it’s so inconsiderate. What the flip do you mean “it’s blocked it”?

No – NO! I don’t care what you’ve read on the Web or seen on TV, hurling faeces out of a window is possible the most bizarre thing to do under any circumstance.

But at least, now we have the new SV Multitool, if you did do that you’d be able to rescue the situation. We’ve taken the concept of the hammer and made it a 21st-century device. Our range of hammer multitools means that no matter the emergency – changing a radio station, opening a locked door or rescuing an errant turd – you will always have the correct hammer to hand.

No need to thank us, ‘being helpful’ is what Stealthvape does.

Currently, 73% of the United Kingdom is currently engaged in filling in paperwork so that your bosses can calculate precisely how much better you are performing now that at the same time last week. We are all being poured into tables and charts to highlight who is the worst – and who is the best at filling in (and telling lies on) forms.

Thanks to annual performance reviews and ridiculously high management targets, we are all working at 13,452% the rate of the average person in 1986. Productivity has never been higher; we are all richer and happier than ever.

Unless you try to catch a train. People who try to catch a train experience delays and strikes, rudeness and tickets that change price by the minute. Oh, and unless you attempt to drive anywhere. People who drive places encounter other people driving on the road. All of these people are impatient, rude and not very good at driving.

The military know this.

For decades, people who like to fight one another sussed out that if you went out in your tank someone else would see it. The next thing you know a little light is flashing, a buzzer is sounding and there’s a missile coming straight for them. Nothing puts a dampener on that Friday afternoon spirit than someone else trying to kill you. Right? We’ve all been there. It’s a real bummer.

So what did the little soldiers do? They went incognito, they embraced the Stealth. They made stuff all black, they put some funky angles on it – but, and this is the most important bit, they called their planes “stealth planes”. Tanks were no longer tanks, they are now “stealth tanks”. Take a flying guess what their little boats are now called go on.

Being stealthy made fighty people much happier and less prone to dwell on how much better stuff used to be. Having a stealthy vape always makes a vaper feel a sense of achievement. It’s clear to us that being stealthy is the future.

We are going to roll out a whole bunch of stuff, beyond vaping, over the rest of 2017. And it all begins with Britain’s second-most popular form of using nicotine: chips. We all love nicotine. We all love chips. We all love the nicotine in chips. But now it’s going to be even better – now they are Stealthchips.

Now we just need to work out how to make fish all angular and a decent way of spraying them a dull machine grey. Once we’ve sussed out how to make Stealthfish there’ll be no stopping us.

Maybe you’re happy with your life? Maybe you’re totally stoked with your vape? It doesn’t matter. If switching to Stealth-life works for people who are all grumpy and misery, just imagine how much more full of beans you’ll feel.

“Martin who? Chapman what?”

Precisely, the point entirely. If you are unaware, McKee is the chubby lover of all things pies, who believes it is his life mission to save the world from itself (*as long as this doesn’t include pies). Chapman is the same kind of thing but less pie-ridden, more Australian and bitter that he never became the rock god he dreamt of being.

But heroes they are, Melissa Sweet (who?) says so because they “speak the truth to power”. Unfortunately, Ms Sweet doesn’t know how much danger she placed the world in with that one tweet. McKee celebrated with another pie binge and Chapman spent three hours looking at his nude self in a mirror immediately after reading it. Anything could have befallen the plane during that time. Literally anything.

Like all heroes, they believe they know better than you and will save you from yourself whether you want it or not (Ref: Marvel’s Civil War). They are going to set you free, they are going to give you liberty. They ride white chargers and have halos and wave mystical swords of righteousness and stuff. Who cares what destruction lies in the wake of this action? Not proper heroes that’s for sure – and it’s that mark of irresponsibility which highlights exactly how heroic MucKy and Chumpman are.

Mucky & Chumpman: making your mind up for you so you don’t have to bother. That’s the film précis right there, Hollywood.

But you, you the pipsqueak in the corner over there. Yes, you. You are like Donald Trump to them. You are the condensed spirit of Hitler, Pol Pot and Simon Cowell. You are the person who told Amy Schumer she could be a comedian. You are the essence of evil because you support a regime that denies their truths. You are with them or you are wrong, for they are academics and always correct and on the side of justice – because they are the heroes.

So, we must be the villains?

You know that evil woman in Game of Thrones? The one who made that king bloke kill his own child for no reason? That’s Lorien Jollye, that is. They may as well rename the New Nicotine Alliance, “The League of Nazis Who Leave Milk Out On Work Surfaces”.

Anybody who perpetuates the myth that vaping offers a workable harm reduction approach to combatting smoking-related diseases is clearly one of the bad guys. It’s obvious because we aren’t members of the gang of heroes; a gang that includes Chapman, McKee, Glantz, Mr Burns, Dick Dastardly, Cruella de Vil, and Darth Vader.

So, thank you Martin McKee, and thank you Simon Chapman. Thank you for speaking the truth to power. Thank you for saving us from ourselves.

Oh, and thank you Andrew Laming for actually knowing what “the truth” is and standing up for evidence-based policy.