Living in a bit of a bubble here in South Gloucestershire, where hardly anyone I know still smokes, it always comes as a great surprise just how many people smoke in Bristol. Well, in the shopping area, by the offices; it seems smoking is almost compulsory! The closer I got to Broadmead, Bristol’s fast fading once prestigious and now half empty shopping centre, the more people seemed to be smoking. And eating. Not only were vast numbers of people puffing away on cigarettes, some were simultaneously devouring pasties. Some feat, and a testament to the versatility of Bristolians.
This is not to suggest that the only smokers are “ordinary people”. Far from it, outside almost every shop and office, a large gaggle of smokers could be found. Power-dressed men and women in a hurry to get through as many carcinogens as possibly in the time available. And as I walked from store to store, the non smoker appeared to be a rare specimen indeed. It was a wonder that I did not stink of cigarettes myself by the time I went home.
I am the worst kind of smoker; the reformed smoker. From around 30 fags a day before 1994, I have not smoked one since. From being an addict who enjoyed some cigarettes but smoked the rest out of habit, I now loathe the very act, the very smell of smoking. It had not occurred to me how much I stank of cigarettes until someone told me about my bad breath. Boy, was I angry at the time, but she was right. Now, happily long cured of this ugly addiction, the smell of a smoker’s breath, a smoker’s house, a smoker’s clothes I find simply hideous. And I cringe to think that stinky person was me once.
I saw few people with e-cigarettes today. I suppose if you have to choose between being addicted to e-cigs, you might as well smoke the real thing. The e-cigs are a bit of a cop-out anyway because the entire point of giving up smoking is to get through the cold turkey and break the habit. And as Chicago memorably pointed out, probably in relation to something quite different, it’s “a hard habit to break”.
If they are like I was, most smokers are hoping they’ll be the lucky one, the person spared from limb amputation, lung cancer, heart disease, COPD and all the other hideous diseases that we now associate with smoking. It was always in the back of my mind that inhaling some 300 carcinogens in each cigarette might just represent a risk, but we smokers are able to point out that 95 year old great uncle who smoked 40 Woodbines a day every day throughout his life and he was fine! We certainly don’t want to point out, as I didn’t, my mother, her mother, her father and her brother who all died as a direct result of smoking. They, I must have figured for many years, were the unlucky ones. I might get away with it.
There is nothing remotely glamorous about smoking, not to my eyes anyway. I understand the “pleasure” of that inhalation because that’s what it is. There is pleasure to be had from satisfying the craving of addiction. It’s stress relief. Not stress relief regarding ordinary life but the stress of being desperate for a fix of nicotine. No one smokes to alleviate the stresses of life, because nicotine, a stimulant which increases the heart rate, causes more stress than it relieves. That’s a fact, I’m afraid, so don’t give the old, “I need a smoke to stop me getting stressed”. You need to stop to avoid the nicotine causing stress in the first place. It’s the same stress as the heroin addict when it’s coming up to fix time.
There might have been a time when I smelled a cigarette and thought to myself, “Mmm. I’d like to have just one puff for old time’s sake” because I now hate it. I know that cigarettes are not cheap either with the decent brands coming in at over £8 a packet. £8 a packet? Good grief. Many of the smokers, especially the younger ones, did not exactly look in the smartest of health. In fact, it was almost as if there was a link between obesity and smoking, although we know the opposite to be true. For £8 you could buy an awful lot of healthy fruit and vegetables.
It was depressing to see so many young people smoking, especially young girls of around 16 years of age. It’s almost as if there is an epidemic among girls of that age group. Someone must be encouraging them to smoke or perhaps it’s seeing parents, role models and their contemporaries light up. The cigarette companies must be thrilled, all these young customers replacing those dying too young or, hopefully, giving up.
The exact words I was told by my friend all those years ago were, “My God, your breath stinks”. I was more embarrassed than angry, but the memory remains vivid. And the reason it remains vivid was because she had struck a chord. My breath did stink, as did her spare room where I was, and for some reason, I was never invited to stay in it again! Funny that.
I felt like walking up to all these addicts and telling them that if I gave up, then anyone could. There is a significant possibility you will live longer, much longer, without cigarettes and a high probability that if you stick with tobacco, you will, sooner or later, run into serious, irreversible problems. I wouldn’t wish the suffering my mother inflicted upon herself with cigarettes on anyone. She managed, somehow, to reach her seventies, but thanks to the pernicious effect of cigarettes, her life was meaningfully over, in terms of physicality, in her mid to late fifties. I guess she thought it would never happen to her. Perhaps that’s why I feared it might happen to me, so why take a chance? At least when she died, it all happened in an instant, an enormous heart attack the inevitable consequence of all that tobacco. Rather that than a slow lingering death through some ghastly cancer.
The best way I can describe smoking is a slow form of suicide. We deny euthanasia to those who wish to end their own chronically diseased lives, but we take taxes from those who legally kill themselves slowly, but in the knowledge, somewhere in the back of their minds, that that is what they are doing.
I read somewhere that around 20% of the population smokes. From what I saw this morning, it seemed it was only about 20% who didn’t!
