Neil Scott

I had my first drag on a cigarette at the age of six. My Dad, who was sitting on the settee in the living rooom of our house in Wigston Fields, held the filter tip between thumb and index finger and beckoned me over to have a drag. The cylindrical softness, the tanginess of the tar, the subsequent cough and the instant disgust. His misguided idea — to teach me how horrible cigarettes were — had worked. Indeed, my condemnation of smoking was highly indignant for years … until, that is, the age of 13 when, with studied indifference, I took a puff on a friend’s sister’s ciggie in order to prove that, a) I could smoke without coughing and, b) it did not appeal to me.

Indeed, when I did start smoking (six months later), it wasn’t because smoking held any appeal. No, it was because I was smoking dope, a drug whose virtues had been endlessly extolled in Cypress Hill lyrics. Cigarettes were essential for spliffs, the attendant nicotine rush was a half-decent substitute, and whilst they may not have made anyone who smoked them particularly “cool”, they certainly brought excitement via the adrenalised evasion of teachers and parents.

Thus began a nine year relationship with tobacco. A relationship whose benefits included bonding over cigarettes with friends, girlfriends, and random strangers; using smoking as a displacement activity when one’s line of thought was knotted; and, well, that’s it. Other perceived benefits, like allowing you to be more relaxed or sharpening thought, were delusions. I agreed with the false-consciousness smashing lines of Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking, noting with him that smokers in bars were always the ones who seemed most ill at ease. So much information about smoking and its effects is clouded and unclear, with people going the extra mile to justify their silly habit to themselves.

Some people say that the Allen Carr method is brainwashing - and I agree, at least in the sense that I feel mentally cleansed of smoking delusion - but I wonder if my difficulty in remembering the Smoking Years in terms of smoking is connected to reading the book. It feels as though I had never smoked during those years . . .

What do I remember?

I remember the furtive attempts to get cigarettes when underage; the number of times I accidentally spilt the ashtray over bed sheets; the dryness in the throat after staying up late to write an essay; the times spent standing outside train stations fearing being touched for a fag by a dosser; the futile attempts to get a dead Clipper to ignite; the hearty suck on the NRT pen as I travelled to Mile End; the miasma that clung to me as I spoke to non-smokers; the winter wheeze . . . Indeed, the only really good smoking memory I have is when I went on holiday with my parents to a resort near Salou and, to escape from their arguing, when to the beach for a Gold Coast Light. It was intensely satisfying, largely due to the nicotine deprivation of the long journey, and seemed to sum up the evanescent feeling that makes a great holiday. I still vividly remember the sense of satisfaction I got from pressing the butt deep down into the sand . . .

Mostly, though, smoking was a waste of time and effort. It has been over four years now and I haven’t fancied one once. The smoking ban seems to me a simple common courtesy rather than an infringement of civil liberties.

I always wondered whether tobacco smoking was a historical accident: it’s obviously something that people did without until Columbus, so why should it have taken hold? Wikipedia tells me that native americans used it as a ritual hallucinogen, not a habitual drug, which is a neat encapsulation of the cynical view of Western culture: debase, habituate, capitalize.

As to my Dad, well, he began smoking when he was 11. He is now 59 and six weeks into Nicotine Replacement Therapy.

Good luck, Dad!

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