A Defence of Smoking (from a Non-smoker)
by Connor Harrison
Je me souviens. Mostly. I am essentially a tobacco tourist: I know very little of the language, I order what I already know I’ll like, and the locals are never fooled. But then smokers tend to be a friendly people. They have to be. Their numbers are dwindling. They are often forced to take their pleasure outside, with the misbehaved dogs, and the doggers.
But I have not gone full-time for a number of very good reasons, the first being that bane of all lungs looking for a good time — asthma. Since birth and sometimes chronic. It is because of this that my mum, accredited smoker of Amber Leaf, worked to scare the urge out of me. She was mostly successful. Meanwhile, however, my sister was busy picking up the family tradition. She would go on smoking until, a late bloomer at the age of twenty-four, she developed asthma herself. You can sometimes catch us outside, sharing a few puffs of unfiltered Salamol Blue.
The second very good reason would be the majority choice: cancer. Tobacco or no tobacco (that is the question) cancer runs through my family like Ozempic through Hollywood, say, or shootings through the Kennedys. My grandad managed to survive massive heart failure and a subsequent heart transplant, only to be taken out barely a decade later by stomach cancer. They call that the Harrison Special. Interestingly, he didn’t pick up smoking until age thirty, a year younger than I am now and, according to his daughter, my mum, ‘about the least cool time to start.’
There are other reasons, of course. Cigarettes are not cheap, and I missed the boat on buying singles by three years and my conception (and if I could buy Marlboros by the one, by now I’d be up to two packs of singles a week). And then there’s the after-smell of burnt nicotine, that infamous, piss-adjacent, yellow-edged stink designed to smother clothes and teeth and living room drapes. This is where we get to the ‘downside,’ you might say, beside the respiratory and carcinogenic. Because I can’t pretend like the smoked cigarette isn’t miserable. The walls take on the colour of an American film set in Mexico. The settee becomes a melancholic whoopee cushion. Glutted ashtrays wait around for the dog to knock over, and the dog stands outside at night barking like Tom Waits.
A blessing, then, that smoking in enclosed spaces is prohibited. No more smoggy bus rides for school kids, or for that matter, playgrounds at three pm looking like the ghost of Christmas future. I can just about remember the ban coming into action in 2007. I was thirteen. Not too long before, I’d been released from the ICU after a lethal dose of breathing. Or lack of, though not for lack of trying. That was also my last proper stay in hospital, so whether by connection or coincidence, I do have to be grateful that all or most of the smoke was redirected to the ozone. Really, I am grateful.
However. With that — that being my health — said.
All enclosed spaces? Are we sure? Is the inside of a greasy spoon not made to be smoked in? Picture with me now ten in the morning, sat at a window table of your local café. From an almost-clean laminated menu, you’ve ordered a full English and a black coffee. There’s a photo on the wall of Elvis for some reason, or Frank Sinatra, in black and white. In one of your hands is a lighter and a pack with a dead man’s cornea on the cover. In the other is a lit fag. Coffee, bacon, fag. A little more coffee. You see what I mean.
And what about bars? Bookies? Casinos? Churches? A way to increase flock size, maybe. A bit of nicotine incense. Most of all, though, I’m talking planes. Yes, Little Chefs, low-lit bars, poker tables and bets on the dogs are all made complete by the addition of cigarette smoke. But surely, of all the enclosed spaces, it’s planes that require them. Watch the annual number of panic attacks fizzle out over Benson & Hedges; need to take your mind off the thirty-thousand foot drop into the Atlantic? Don’t worry, here comes your croissant and roll-up. The lighter comes in the shape of the Concorde. Doubles as a kid’s toy. Remember what Mark Wahlberg said. If tobacco had been up there that day, it might not’ve went down like it did.
No, no, I’m joking of course. I’m sure I am. As I say, I’m not a smoker, but I do love smoking (I also love animals but eat meat, and I can’t drive but love service stations. Eat your heart out Walt Whitman). I am, unfortunately, a cigarette romantic, an idiot convinced that they are cool. There is some proof for this in the arrival of the vape. For all intents and purposes, a cigarette clone, minus the character. What Kim Kardashian is to Paris Hilton, the almond milk to cow, Bluesky to Twitter, Dubai to New York. Keir Starmer to Emmanuel Macron.
Which leads us tidily to the elephant in the room: Labour’s recent decision to ban smoking for those poor souls born post-2008. Which of course was inevitable, and is good. And really, why should I care, you might ask — I’ll be dead before the ban takes complete effect. That’s very true. I shouldn’t be selfish, or precious. In fact I should be glad, since vapes also fall under the ban, meaning less streets doused in diabetic battery acid. But what the announcement has helped to clarify, is that I have two horses in this two-horse race.
So in principle I agree with the oncoming law, if at least for the sake of health. At the same time – regardless, even, of the health benefits — I can’t help but feel for that losing mule, wheezing along under its brittle mane, stopping every twenty yards to clear out phlegm, and lick the edge of a Rizla.
Or maybe I’ll move to France, where the smoking is taken seriously, and the horses are too scared to slow down.