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It was once a part of every business but this week there were indications that the smoking room is fast becoming extinct. Nottinghamshire County Council announced that it is considering banning its staff from smoking on its premises or even outside during a break. People concerned about smoking, including passive smoking, praise the plan while others think it threatens personal freedom. Even though I’m someone who’s never smoked and I recognise the health hazards of doing so, in some ways I regret the end of smoking rooms, and not just because it kept the smoke out of my eyes. Because in a way we all benefited from that special room for a fag break. It was a place where all kinds of sociable cross-fertilisation could occur in an office. It was where someone from marketing would chat to another staffer from accounts; where the boss from network support met the intern from HR. There was even once an episode of Friends where Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston, took up cigarettes just so that she could use the smoking room because important decisions got made there. It was human behaviour that made a smoking room a useful space: we tend to build very defined territories even when we are part of the same organisation, and a smoking room was where barriers could be broken. I’ve just been reading a newly published book about the Dutch which describes how in the 1950s Dutch society was so segregated that a Protestant and Catholic living on the same street never met: they belonged not only to schools but also to universities, businesses, trade unions, and social clubs that were either Protestant or Catholic. They ended their days in old people’s homes run by their denominations before a Catholic or Protestant undertaker put them in the cemetery of their religion. This might be an extreme version of separation but humanity will always finds ways to put up barriers and needs places where there can be fluidity. In the Gospels there are countless stories of Christ engaging with people that others would frown upon, from prostitutes to tax collectors. In Samaria at a well – the first century AD equivalent of the water cooler – he meets a Samaritan woman, who is completely taken aback that a Jew would talk to her. The conversation quickly becomes profound about the most important aspects of her life. The well, the water cooler and the smoking room have all played vital roles in their time in helping break societies’ rigid codes about who we talk to. But wherever people gather, without that Christlike willingness to see the person, rather than the stranger, they will be no more than meaningless spaces.