It was 1993
and D:Ream were busy telling us that things would only get better.
Things didn’t,
of course, and I advanced to planning to quit when they passed the £3 mark.
When I was a
bit skint, I used to go to Darlington’s premier smoking emporium and buy loose-weight
tobacco. A bag full of black cherry-flavoured noodles and a packet of liquorice
papers for £1.90 would last me a week and make me look like a twat.
Nobody
smoked roll-ups in those days and my mother walked in on me rolling a few
before a night out once. She was relieved that it wasn’t “wacky baccy” I was
using.
But they
were enlightened times for the smoker. There wasn’t anywhere you couldn’t do
it. You could smoke on a train; you could smoke on a plane. It was like being
the Sam-I-Am of nicotine.
Prices
continued to rise and the number of places you could smoke decreased.
A fag with a
pint isn’t the same when you have to stand outside the back of a pub, next to
the bins which haven’t been emptied for a fortnight, as rain tops up your pint
and the loud whir of a colossal fridge motor from the cellar gives you
tinnitus.
I gave up,
or rather took a smoking sabbatical, for eighteen months. I was always going to
return to the habit, even though smokers now command the same level of respects as lepers or traffic wardens.
Now you ask
for 20 cigarettes and the packets only contain 19. If you want decent smokes, they’re
over £8 a packet. If you’re not that rich, you can get cigarettes made from the
sweepings up at a proper cigarette factory for £6.
50 grams of rolling
tobacco will cost you just under £20 these days and you will always find at least
one small piece of wood hiding amongst the flakes.
I’m going to
try and give up again.
The
combination of willpower and an anorexic wallet should help out.
There’s also
talk of hypnotism. I’m just a bit concerned that when I become addicted to that,
I’ll have to walk around with Paul McKenna strapped to my arm.
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