I’m having a cigarette now. And, I have to say, I’m enjoying it. As the orange filter touches my lips they instantly form a rubbery seal around the end. I suck in deeply and the air outside is pulled through a little furnace of tar, tobacco and carbon monoxide.
By the time it reaches my lungs it’s changed quite dramatically and I feel the familiar catch of smoke as it moves deep into my chest. The satisfying hit of nicotine filters into my blood and a mild electric buzz tingles around head. I exhale and a cloud of smoke billows in front of me forming silky swirls in the air.
And that’s just the first drag.
“Wanting to be cool”
Just as I begin to embark on the whole, exhilarating experience again, that damn advert comes on. The one I really hate.
The camera slowly pans along a rubber tube following it to its source. In the background you hear the sound of strained, painful breathing. Eventually the source is revealed; a hole in a man’s neck. The punchy tag line reads: ‘Enough said?’
I fumble for the remote control and squash multiple buttons down at the same time. Randomly, I get the tail end of a ridiculous perfume commercial where the woman turns into a phoenix, flies into the sun and then explodes into a cacophony of scented rose petals. OK, so I made that one up, but it sounds credible for a perfume commercial doesn’t it?
The next advert is another anti-smoking commercial confirming my belief that the terrestrial channels are in cahoots with one another and have wised up to our sneaky, channel-hopping ways.
It seems strange to think back on the days where smoking was glamourised. I’ll always remember the Stuyvesant roller-blading babes, the lost cities discovered by the Camel man and the sophisticated Benson & Hedges yachting crowd. I remember how my allegiance to particular brands was cunningly manipulated by the pernicious marketeers. I remember falling for it hook, line and sinker.
I remember wanting to be cool.
Adapt or die
And now, after years and years of pro-smoking propaganda they are banning smoking in public places. A part of me feels like a great injustice has been committed.
They are the bastards who got me hooked in the first place. I bought cigarettes and I paid my tax to the government and they happily took it. They caught me in their web. I’m a victim. I shouldn’t be ostracised, victimised…. demonised!. I should be given treatment. Help. Counselling. Cash?
But, as Bob Dylan sang; ‘The times they are a-changing’. Text sex. Pausing and rewinding live TV. War (OK, it’s been around for a while but can now be experienced on high-definition television). Cyber dating. Political correctness gone mad. Political incorrectness also gone mad. Good bacteria. Bird flu. Globalisation. Miniaturisation. And, of course, the freedom to light up after two beers, a few glasses of Merlot, a crumbed mushroom starter followed by a char-grilled rump steak.
Wheezing dinosaurs
As some famous bloke once said: ‘It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.’
His point, obviously, is that to survive we need to adapt or we become extinct. So unless we are to become a wheezing bunch of brontosauruses we need to lock the cultural legacies of smoking away in a display cabinet and go, ‘Wow! That was pretty weird.’ Or, as the Guardian put it, we need to say goodbye to these king-size highlights from the smoking days of yore:
- Coolness: James Dean and my personal favourite, Nick Cage in Wild at Heart.
- Song Writers’ Muse: Oasis — “It’s a crazy situation/ But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol.”
- The Entire French Nation: Perhaps not such a bad thing.
- Cigarette tricks: How can I possibly re-apply my smoke-ring blowing skills?
- Cigarette girls: Where are they all going to go? Please tell me now!
- Bike sheds: Could still be used for kissing I suppose.
- A currency for prisoners: Gambling for celery sticks doesn’t have quite the same edge.
- Zippo Lighters: For the brief moments that I’ve managed to hang on to one I’m sure I looked quite sexy.
- Cigarette warnings: How else are the government going to terrify us? Oh right, they’ve still got bird flu.
Reflecting on all this, I decide to leave the office and go for a smoke. A postman walks past and sees me enjoying my fag break. He muffles his nose in his jacket and exaggeratedly steers away.
“Keep that away from me, I don’t want your poison,” he sneers. I chuckle, expecting his comment to be a joke.
“Laugh all you want mate. You won’t be laughing when you end up dead like my sister. And you will!” He marches off, furious!
Yup, I think it’s time to kick the habit.
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