Open Writing

There you are at the bar, a pint of hand-drawn Tetley bitter about to delight the palate, when someone standing next to you lights up a fag.

Instead of a mouthful of delight, you get a noseful of choking smoke.

Thoughts turn to bloody murder.

I’m not bloodthirsty enough to actually support a call for the extermination of all smokers. But I would gladly give cash for research into a cigarette-extinguishing device.

Something the size of a cigarette lighter, that could be put to far better use than encouraging long-term suicide. An invention that would secretly and silently put out every smouldering cigarette within a 15-yard radius.

Then prevent them from being re-lit.

We could start to breath deeply in pubs and restaurants.

And my sweaters and shirts wouldn’t stink as though they’d been used as pipe cleaners each time I come in from the local working men’s club.

You might have guessed that I’m an ex-smoker. A 40--a-day man. Coverts always make the most rabid preachers.

I came late to the weed. Not so much as an experimental drag until I was 19, and a national serviceman in the Air Force.

I arrived home on a 48-hour pass, walked into the kitchen, there to be confronted by my mother in tears.

“Your dad’s dying. He has pneumonia.’’

The situation was overstated, but not by much.

It was a week before my father got out of bed, and when he did I was hooked on tobacco.

Dad was a pipe smoker, though every morning, first thing, while lighting the fire, he smoked a Craven A.

There was a packet on the mantel shelf. I tried one. I felt dizzy, but I persisted. Millions of others smoked. I wasn’t going to be a weakling.

On day two, worrying about my father’s illness, I finished the packet, then went out and bought 20 Players.

A fortnight later I was smoking Capstan Full Strength.

I took to smoking like custard to pie. It seemed inevitable that one day we should have got together.

Life was enveloped in a permanent cloud of smoke.

I coughed a lot. My chest rattled. I suffered from permanent colds in the head.

But I doggedly continued enjoying only the first cigarette of the day, along with the first cigarette after a meal.

When I eventually went to work in America the smoke clouds thickened.

An air force sergeant based on a local nuclear bomber station let me have king-sized Chesterfields from the local PBX at 16 cents a pack.

What a bargain! Ignore the fact that I was now coughing like a Gattling gun.

The ash trays in my flat looked like a small mountain range.

Then I married a shrewd Texas lass.

She hated cigarette smoke. She appealed to me to sop smoking.

I tried. I failed.

She used guile. She had learned something of a Yorkshireman’s financial caution.

“Add up what you spend on cigarettes in a year,’’ she said. “Go out and buy yourself a present for that amount. Then stop smoking.’’

I bought myself a good watch.

Then I stopped smoking at a New Year’s Eve party. Five minutes to midnight, December 31, 1963.

Haven’t touched a cigarette.

Can anyone tell me why it is still legal for a shopkeeper to regularly sell a product that will cause scores of thousands of untimely deaths?