Joanne McNeill: Passing time with the pariahs

Joanne McNeill.

I hate waiting. Who doesn't?

Once supplies of cryptic crosswords and reading were exhausted, a five-hour waiting marathon at the hellhole known as Auckland Airport, on account of a rescheduled plane, seemed like forever.

Once upon a time, when smokers were permitted indoors, the best airport waiting strategy was to proceed straight to the bar where perfect strangers happily whiled away the deadly boredom by sharing ashtrays and boasting to each other over drinks as they came and went their separate ways, probably never to meet again.

The danger of plunging deeply into conversation with a dancer from Uzbekistan and missing the plane was mitigated by horrendous booze prices preventing total inebriation.

Now smokers have been banished outdoors, airport interiors are vast unfriendly transit halls - peopled with the fixed stares and unsmiling faces of automatons, cocooned in steely determination, poker-faced in bars and at what I hesitate to call "food" counters.

Maybe the obvious success of demonising and vilifying formerly acceptable smokers has made everyone else justifiably more guarded lest they too prove suddenly wanting in some as yet unidentified but potentially shaming respect.

Outside though, you could not meet a friendlier, more interesting, generous, sympathetic, eclectic and communicative bunch of people than the beleaguered outcasts huddled in the smoking section.

I suppose the instant camaraderie comes of the shared experience of constant exile and financial suffering smokers must endure in an increasingly sanctimonious world.

Auckland Airport's smokers' benches might be a long march past rows of no-smoking signs away, hot, fly-ridden, regularly blasted with bus exhaust fumes and provided with an ugly view of concrete but at least there are seats, cover and good company.

The procession of patrons included passengers, airline and airport staff - among them my first Chatham Islanders, a Swiss hairdresser, a Chinese family going to a reunion in Invercargill with frangipani in their hair, a very witty character from Napier, pilots up for retraining on flight simulators, an English visitor and a posse of lucky students off to Dunedin for their first year of sofa burning 101 at Otago.

Helpfully I was shown where the spare lighters (left by international passengers) are kept for emergencies, and was privy to a reassuringly genial demonstration that the official reaction to an unattended bag is not to blow it up, but to run a sniffer dog over it first.

One airport staffer selflessly bemoaned the growth of tourism and immigration - saying they have made us low-paid servants and tenants in our own land.

We all bemoaned the price of cigarettes, the moral tax on which rose by another 20 per cent at New Year with nary a public murmur about the unfairness of a tax-take which well exceeds smokers' health costs even at their most extravagant estimation.

I suppose the exorbitant price is meant as a deterrent although to smokers it feels more like at best milking lucrative scapegoats to prop up an otherwise precarious economy, or at worst trying to kill us off with poverty should we refuse obstinately to die from the allegedly lethal effects of tobacco.