Dream River café

I love SGR and I love Dream River Café. But they should not allow their pavement tables to be taken over by local guys who just smoke and dont order anything to eat or drink and don't pay. It's very bad business practice and puts off real customers. Bad news. End of a good café?

Comments

  • edited June 2013
    Actually, I take that back, a couple of coffees did eventually appear. And of course anyone has as much of a right to sit there as anyone else. But on a more general more, I think the smoking ban has had a really negative impact on the once-desirable 'pavement cafe' experience everywhere. You are now forced to share the 'fresh air' with smokers belching foul second hand smoke in your direction and over your food. Disgusting, and especially on a warm summers day when sitting outside should be healthy and a pleasure. Who agrees?
  • You mean when sitting outside Dream River Cafe with the diesel fumes from passing traffic (mostly the buses) washing over you?
  • Yes, but we live with diesel fumes all the time. Fag fumes in your face from a fellow human three feet away are infinitely more *unpleasant* and downright anti social - nothing to do with 'passive smoking'.
  • Somebody should start a smoke-free, music-free cafe. I emphatically agree with Krappy. Londoners learn to live with diesel fumes, etc, but cigarette smoke positively searches out the poor non-smoker to torment him (me), and it makes no difference whether I am upwind or not, whether I move to another seat, or try to sit it out. I know smokers have a good case, and that things have improved immeasurably (remember smokers' carriages, and the top decks of buses, pre-legislation?), but it still drives me mad that there's no escaping this mini-form of pollution in the summer.
  • Huh, I was in dreamriver today and was thinking how nice it was. Mind you, I was inside with the sensible people.
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  • Not a fan of second hand smoke either. My former downstairs neighbour used to smoke at the window. Very bad. I constantly had the disgusting smell in drifting up to my flat. I seem to fit the model: smoker turning into a militant non-smoker. I find even walking behind someone who smokes disgusting and either hold my breath or quickly walk past. <br>
  • edited June 2013
    Absolutely, Stella. I'm a militant ex-smoker too. I wonder how long ago Miss C gave up? I'd be surprised if she stayed a Bisto Kid forever.
  • A friend of mine is an ex-smoker, too, and said he loves a whiff of smoke floating past him. I often think that people who still love the smell are more prone to go back to smoking. Might be wrong there. <br>Guess it depends on why and how you're giving up. I gave up over night, deciding that smoking ain't got anything positive. <br>
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  • Back to cigarette smoke versus combustion engine fumes. Given that people have been smoking longer than cars have been on the roads, if you can accept the fumes from the new the fangled horseless carriage then surely cigarette smoke, which has been around longer is fine too! ;)
  • I was a heavy to light smoker. Cigarettes were part of my life for 16 years. Also mainly in the time I worked in restaurants and bars. I never understood how people got up and had a fag for breakfast, terrible. I rarely smoked that early, only started in the afternoon. And I hated kissing my boyfriend when he had a roll-up. He was a heavy smoker. So I guess I was more a social smoker than anything else. Glad I gave up, though, and I never looked back. <br><br>Yagamuffin: I don't like it particularly if I'm standing behind a bus at the traffic lights. The point is, walking into the street doesn't have me gagging, but walking into a room or flat where people smoke is doing that to me. If you're sitting outside, and people left, right, and centre are smoking, you'll sit in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It's disgusting. I wouldn't like it either if there was a parked car that boosts its fumes at me. <br><br>Another thing I've watched many people doing here: waste their money and harm the environment. Having a car running when parking should be fined.<br>
  • Sorry Stella, I'm with you. My tongue was firmly in my cheek, sadly the one thing the Internet hasn't yet given us is the ability to convey emotion in text!<div><br></div><div>Although I am a smoker I must confess to being an embarrassed and sometimes guilty feeling smoker and I too hate the smell.</div>
  • Can't get through the day without my coffee-and-Marlboro-Lights breakfast. Keeps one regular, too. 
  • Vetski - too much info mate. Chang
  • As a lifelong non-smoker, I really hated the smoking ban. Venues stank for years afterwards (some still do) of all the far worse things the fags were covering up. Beyond that, it just felt profoundly illiberal that you couldn't even get an exemption for a pub where all the staff and customers were hardcore smokers. And now, all it's gained is people complaining about the smokers outside. Reckon they've earned the right to those outside tables in summer by all the times they toughed it out there over the long winter.
  • ADGS.  I agree with you on those cranky sods who complain about people smoking outside.  However, if you want a taste of smoking bars, take a trip to Berlin (they still have many) and relish the after effect of smoke on hair and clothes.
  • Don't talk about the war Chang
  • I was asked if I minded not smoking in the street by a very posh woman I just laughed and lit a cig, it's legal to smoke outside so I will. Sick of being persecuted because I do something totally legal. It might not be wise or healthy but it's not against the law.
  • There are lots of things that are not against the law but are nevertheless unpleasant if you happen to be close by. So the person at the next table spits, farts, belches, swears and discusses his venereal warts loudly on the phone. Comfortable with that?
  • I've heard plenty worse than that from the next table in pubs.
  • Blimey. Which pubs do you use? :-)
  • I've heard worse on the bus, doesn't need alchohol to make people overshsre.
  • <P>Do fags not contibute to an early death either in primary or secondary smoking mode.</P> <P>Thought that was why they were banned in enclosed spaces. </P>
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