The fag-end of history

I was sitting in the pub the other night staring at an ashtray for some reason, when two things occurred to me (as they do after a few drinks):

The first is, there's a Turner Prize to be won by collecting thousands of soon-to-be defunct ashtrays from the UK's pubs and clubs and stacking them to form one big ashtray, or a wall of ashtrays. So that's a project to keep me going for a while. Forget "shedboatshed" I'm going to do "ashtray-ashtray-er, ashtray".

The second, rather more serious, is that I hope someone somewhere is telling bar managers what to do with all their ashtrays. With the ban on public smoking coming in to force soon, we have the potential for several landfill sites to be brimming over with the things, most of which could be recycled.

Update: Thanks Shaun for crushing that fantasy - he pointed out that someone's already spotted the potential of the demise of the humble ashtray.