Tag Archives: cigarettes

Two chain smokers with whom I had been friendly

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I have had  two friends who were chain smokers. Each smoked in excess of 100 cigarettes per day. One was a man who lived in Yugoslavia,  and another, a lady, who lived in Wales.

Seen at Vapi in Gujarat

I used to travel around Yugoslavia with my Serbian friend, and we often shared hotel rooms. As soon as he woke in the morning,  he had his first cigarette, and last thing at night, after cleaning his teeth, he had to have another. One year when I  met him, he told me that his doctor had told him to give up smoking. He decided not to give up completely, but to limit himself to one cigarette per hour. While he did this, he was permanently distracted because every few minutes he had to look at his watch to discover how much longer he had to wait before he could light the next cigarette.  Eventually,  he abandoned the effort, and returned to chain smoking.

My Welsh friend, let us call her ‘F’, smoked at least as many cigarettes as my friend in Yugoslavia, if not more.  Each summer, we used to spend a few days with her at her home in Wales. When the windows were open, as they were often in summer, you could smell cigarette smoke as far away as 50 feet from the house. The place seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of cigarette fumes.

One year, F accompanied us on a long-haul flight. She knew that she would be unable to smoke during the 11 hours we were on board. Realising this, she quilted smoking overnight – she was a very determined woman. Within 24 hours, she went from smoking over 100 cigarettes per day to none at all.

To her credit, she never resumed smoking. She told us that one of the benefits of having given up was that she did not need to have the walls within her house repainted every year because they were no longer becoming discoloured by smoke from the cigarettes.

Both F and my Yugoslav friend are no more. Interestingly, neither of them suffered from, or died of lung cancer. I miss both of them.

A puff of smoke

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Three students

 

My father gave up smoking when I was about eight years old. As far as I know, my mother never smoked. I had an aunt who smoked, and entertained us by creating smoke rings with exhaled cigarette smoke. Visitors to our home smoked, so I was not completely isolated from cigarettes and so on during my earliest years. 

I was about 13 or 14 when I went on a field trip with other boys from my class. On that outing, I was shocked to see many of my fellow pupils lighting up cigarettes when we were out of sight of our teachers. I did not realise until that moment thay young children smoked.

In those early years, and possibly still today, I was a contrarian. Being that sort of person and seeing my peers smoking made me decide never to even try smoking, and  this situation remains unchanged tosay, so many decades later. It was not for health reasons nor because of economic problems that I have never taken up smoking. I simply did not want to be one of the crowd.

I often wonder if the situation had been reversed whether I would have become a smoker. If no one else had been smoking, would I have lit up just to be different? I doubt it because as a child I was far from adventurous.

Smoking prohibited

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No smoking_640

 

A few years ago, it became illegal to smoke in any public place in the UK, be it a place of work or a place of leisure. Other countries have the same prohibitions on smoking.

We spent a holiday in Istanbul in 2010 and noticed that all bars, cafés, and restaurants were places where smoking was forbidden. Yet in one tea house on the Asian side of the Bosphorous, we saw everyone was puffing away on cigarettes, even those who were sitting close to the ‘no smoking’ signs. The picture attached to this blog article was taken in Bangalore, India. It shows how much notice is taken of a ‘no smoking’ sign.

A couple of years ago, we were staying in Goa’s capital Panjim. Our host told us that smoking is forbidden in all public places including on the streets. How seriously this is policed, I do not know.

One of the objects of anti-smoking policies is to reduce the chances of secondary smoking, which is inhalation of exhaled cigarette smoke by people near to a smoker but not smoking themselves. This is a worthy and sensible reason for banning smoking in public places. 

The prohibition of smoking makes pubs far more pleasant, but I have a reservation about restaurants. Having been brought up eating in restaurants where some diners are smoking, I feel that the current absencse of smoking in these places detracts from their ambience ever so slightly.