My favourite part – and there’s a few – of the government’s new laws banning smoking in pubs and clubs is that they came in to force on 1 July. The very dead of winter. No balmy alfresco durries on gossipy city balconies for you, smokers: you’ll be freezing your butts off outside, noses pressed against icy windows, glumly wiping away the condensation to better make out the open fires and hot toddies inside. It’s a neat plan, and my money says ex-smokers are behind it. Because the take-home message for those who smoke is clear. We hate you.
Smokers now have two options. You stay a smoker, or you can use the new restrictions to propel yourself in to the superior plane of the ex-smoker. Them’s my people. (You’ll never, by the way, be a non-smoker – those benign, rational, dullish fuddy-duddies don’t understand that cigarettes will stay front and centre whether you smoke or not.) Now, you might imagine giving up smoking is about patches and hypnotherapy and avoiding trigger situations. It’s not. It’s about learning to hate and hector. Learning to detest the act of smoking. As an ex-smoker, you will need to rant. Self-righteously.
To stoke the fires of your hatred, you must first saturate yourself in foulness of the habit you’re about to relinquish. So let’s start with some home truths. Firstly, you stink. Unless you’re smoking in my face – which you often do – it’s not a contained stink that wafts past Pepe Le Peu-style, but a general whiffy infusion that stains you like a kind of rank tea. Your clothes stink and your hair, and so, faintly, does your skin. If you’re single, that’s why. (Or it could be your sick-making habit of sprinkling beer into a full ashtray to put out its tiny embers.) By they way, don’t bother sniffing your clothes to locate the stink: you’re immune to it.
You also make us stink. You swell our dry-cleaning bills, while never offering to pay them. Leaving your presence is superseded by a heavy session of scrubbing our skin till it’s raw and bleeding. And if you’re not stinking us up, you’ve racked off outside for a fag and left us sitting alone like a Nigel. Or worse, talked us into an outside table on the bitterest of Melbourne afternoons. See how smoking is lose-lose. But being an ex-smoker is one grumpy win after another.
While we’re on it, smoking is not, as a friend of mine claims, “European”. Ladies, you do not look like Keira Knightly; gentlemen, you are either too young, or too old, to look cool. When you cluster outside your office you are not trading secrets or bonding in ways that non-smokers don’t understand. On the contrary, back in our warm and freshly scented surrounds we’re making exciting professional and social plans that exclude you. Also, you know how you keep claiming you quit and you haven’t really started again, but maybe you’ll just have one? It’s boring. And you know how you leave us to discover butts in our garden after dinner parties? It’s gross. And you know how you wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the dull ache in your chest is lung cancer? It is.
Being a smoker makes you rude and inconsiderate in ways that will amaze you after you give up. Recently, I saw someone light up at a dinner table while my friend, sitting right next to her, was still eating. My friend gagged, and couldn’t finish her meal, while the smoker puffed away oblivious, bless her fatty-deposited heart. Last winter, in a non-smoking bar, another friend asked if she could borrow my gorgeous, woollen, fake-fur-trimmed, bespoke winter coat to keep warm in while she fagged away outside. The sad thing is, I let her.
Finally – and perhaps this is the most difficult to accept – smoking is no rebellion. It is a bleak, wretched acquiescence to that most clichéd of diabolical beasts: the tobacco company. And that’s before you surrender, if you’re as stupid as I, to the drug company, which will replace your durry addiction with a gum or patch addiction, for reasons far more to do with fear than therapy. (For four years, I consumed nicotine gum so far over the recommended dose that, when I finally confessed to my doctor, she immediately ordered a cardiogram.) Truth is, you don’t need a replacement. You just need to stop. Smoking is making you old, and ugly, and rapidly, irretrievably dead.
Research shows that smoking restrictions do help smokers give up. Frankly, we don’t have enough – for reasons best classified as political correctness gone crazy, smokers are still allowed to light up in their own homes. I’m going to work on that. Until then, I urge you to join the ranks of self-righteous, irritating know-it-alls. But if you do choose to keep smoking, may this winter be glacial. Shiver in your jocks.
