This time next month it will still be legal to smoke in bed except, presumably, if you are a prostitute. Then the bed would be a place of work visited by customers and a ciggie would be a crime.
Smoking is illegal inside your place of work. You have to step outside for a cigarette, unless your place of work is a submarine at sea, in which case you must smoke Senior Service.
You can smoke if you have an office in your home but not if work colleagues visit regularly and, if you are a vicar, you can smoke in your study as long as you promise not to welcome parishioners there.
You will still be allowed to smoke at bus stops but not if they have sides and a roof. Whether that includes bus stops with a roof and only one side I cannot say but you will find out soon enough when you are set upon by outraged fellow travellers or when a 100-mph police car responding to CCTV pictures or a 999 call rushes to the scene and wafts you off to the nearest nick.
In court you will plead guilty to one Marlboro Light and ask for 19 similar Marlboro to be taken into consideration. If you are fortunate you will be sentenced to a period of solitary confinement in prison where you will be allowed to smoke in your cell (no smoking is allowed in communal areas).
Whatever is eventually written on my gravestone, let it not be “he never inhaled"
We are entering a new era of zero tolerance. When no-smoking laws come into force on July 1 there will be no ifs and no butts, especially no butts. Anti-litter rules stipulate an on-the-spot fine of £80 for fag ends dropped on the pavement. What a clean, unpleasant land England may become, soft on louts, tough on snouts.
Nobody doubts that smoking is bad for you, most people accept passive smoking is bad for you too. No doubt these new prohibitions will be good for the heart but I fear they may be bad for the soul.
Smoking has become a sin and the pious but unrealistic Christian nostrum “hate the sin but love the sinner” is no more likely to apply to smokers than any other sinners. “Hate the smoke, love the smoker” – I don’t think so. People feel empowered, even instructed to abuse and attack smokers. Better strike a child than strike a light.
Self-improvement brings out the worst in most of us. We have given up, why can’t they? We felt like bad people when we smoked, they are bad people now, weak and noxious. They stink, we sniff.
We have decided cigarettes are not just offensive, they are offensive weapons. I, with my new super-sanitised and sensitised nasal canals, am pristine and perfect. Every fibre of my being and my jacket would be violated by the merest whiff of a Rothmans and you would be vile to do it to us.
This is the moment but are we prepared for the extra longevity it will bring? The notices on packets say Smoking Causes Blindness and Smoking Causes Lung Cancer; but should it not say Giving Up May Seriously Overstretch Your Pension?
In the land of Gordon Brown we should not shy away from prudent calculation. Another decade’s cigarette buying or a few more years paying for a twilight home – which is the less crippling?
Aversion therapy, thought control and moral righteousness – that’s the modern way. Not live and let live, nor live and let die. How many like me, lifelong spasmodic dieters, find themselves incapable of even touching certain food?
“That looks like… a biscuit… saturated fat… oh my God! I just can’t even look at any brown food these days, except dates. And I can’t imagine how those people over there can bear to eat what they’re eating… macaroni cheese and chips… don’t they know they’re killing themselves? Disgusting!”
The food battle goes on (the constant war between the nice and good) but nobody can doubt the moral smoking battle is won. With little more than a whimper, or at most a chesty cough, workers, drinkers, landlords, restaurateurs everywhere from Cork to New York to Auld Reekie have within the past four years accepted smoking bans and got used to them.
Though a quarter of men and women in England still smoke, the majority has become a minority – gone are the days of happy conviviality when colleagues bonded across the desk over a Silk Cut; the in-group has become the out-group – those people in the street furtively leaning against the wall smoking aren’t people with no jobs. They’re the people with jobs.
Half a century ago cigarettes carried the imprimatur of the great and good. Some, like Craven A (cork tipped), claimed to be recommended by doctors.
Others were more stellar: Olivier, made by Benson and Hedges, claimed to be specially blended for the great actor and there he was on the advertisements, hand on jaw, cigarette between his fingers, smoke drifting upwards.
Olivier were rather more butch than Du Maurier (named after the famous actor Gerald Du Maurier, father of Daphne du Maurier) which came in a lovely red packet with a hinged lid that lifted up.
In the obituary of John Sandilands, a wonderful journalist who died three years ago in his 70s, was this sentence that brings back other times: “He travelled to remote and distant places, sustained by parcels of Olivier cigarettes airmailed to him by his wife and by his phlegmatic, imperturbable Britishness.”
This week Charles Webb, author of The Graduate, the novel on which the film was based, was interviewed about his over-four-decades-delayed sequel Home School.
Mrs Robinson, now much older, and Benjamin Braddock are still its central characters but I think we can assume that if it is ever made into a film we shall not see Mrs Robinson take in a mouthful of cigarette smoke, kiss Benjamin, then exhale as she did 40 years ago.
When Sharon Stone crossed and uncrossed her legs in the famous police station scene in Basic Instinct and asked “What are you going to do, arrest me for smoking?” knickers, not nicotine, was really the burning issue. But that was 1992. Today, when young film stars seem to treat knickers as an optional extra on evenings out, nicotine is far more sensational.
Maybe lives will be saved by this new puritanism but who can doubt that a whole culture and a whole dimension of life has been lost?
It will take all the power of internet dating sites to compensate for the easy intimacy of stranger approaching stranger in a bar and asking if they have a light or a spare cigarette.
Lauren Bacall made the greatest first-line debut in movie history in To Have And Have Not. She slinks into the room and asks “Anybody got a match?” Do you think the effect would have been the same if she asked: “Anybody got a Nicorette?”
How our priorities have changed. How our culture has turned around. In the Forties Eric Maschwitz wrote one of the most haunting songs ever produced by a British writer. It starts: “A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces An airline ticket to romantic places…”
These Foolish Things, a song full of longing for the exotic actress Anna May Wong with whom he’d had a relationship in Hollywood, a song that tugged at the heartstrings then.
Nowadays those lines would be the death sentence to any liaison: “A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces”? Excuse me while I vomit. “An airline ticket to romantic places”… just think of the carbon footprint!
We long ago lost the lovely swirl of audience smoke into the cinema projector’s beam, replaced by the crunch of nation-size pots of nachos.
The NHS announced this week that it will dispense Champix, a new drug that seems highly effective at curbing nicotine craving by releasing the “pleasure” hormone dopamine into the brain.
How long, I wonder, before it is made compulsory for those applying for public sector jobs or surreptitiously injected into staple foodstuffs?
Primitive internet researches reveal that some recommend smoking cinnamon sticks as a way of weaning yourself off tobacco. Funny that. I have lived my life upside down – cinnamon sticks weaned me on to tobacco.
I was a little kid when my cousin Nat came from Edinburgh and escorted me to a health food shop where we bought and puffed them during the matinee performance at the Odeon.
After that I smoked on and off for three decades or more, a fair number per day without ever really being what you would call a serious smoker.
I did, however, run the gamut of brands from Turf (a Woodbine equivalent) to Passing Clouds, oval cigarettes that came in a pink packet, the apogee of English ponciness; then Gïtane, for the Paris Left Bank aura, and Gïtane Maïs, browny-yellow cigarettes that looked and smelt fabulous but tended to burn in a series of explosions.
When I was a boy my father smoked Gold Flake which came in lovely yellow boxes. Untipped, the paper tended to stick to his lip and pull off little bits of skin.
For the latter part of my smoking days it was boring old Silk Cut and when I decided to give up, I did it just-like-that, without any problem and with no looking back. No loyalty, no withdrawal pangs.
You may say I was lucky but I found it all rather disturbing. The shaming truth was, I think that as Bill Clinton said of marijuana joints: “I smoked but never inhaled.”
What a horrible epitaph that would be in relation to any of life’s activities. It suggests that you sort of did something but never dared do it properly and that you could easily fall in with any oppressive prohibitions the powers-that-be chose to come up with.
Whatever is eventually written on my gravestone, let it not be “he never inhaled”.
