I smoke, and I smoke a lot. Not through any particular love of smoking, it seems, but more to do with my complete inability to quit. And I know it’s bad for me, and everyone around me, and I’m almost certainly going to hell for it. It will inevitably cause me and anyone who comes near me to get a bunch of horrible cancers, I know, and every time I light one up, baby Jesus cries and a fairy somewhere drops dead. You don’t need to post and tell me this. I am aware, and feel the required sense of shame and remorse, and will undoubtedly attempt to quit again soon. And fail.
Yet I find myself attracted to other smokers – not because of the smoke itself, but because of the stigma attached to smoking – it seems to, in some way, suggest that the smoker him or herself is a rebel, an imperfect being, the one who is made to stand outside the door with the other flawed, interesting outcasts and tread the path of tentative self-destruction. Entirely unbroken people are rarely as fun to talk to. During one of my brief periods as a non-smoker in my late teens, I took to pretending to go for cigarette breaks at the office, as I needed a brief soujourn from the tedious, sanctimonious lifelong non-smokers I’d found myself stuck indoors with. Just think of the difference between the dull, pastel-print Sandy at the beginning of Grease and the uninhibited, tight-trousered, chain-smoking Sandy at the end of Grease. Which would you rather be trapped in a lift with (provided that the lift was, of course, well ventilated)?
I find it reassuring when someone I admire turns out to be a smoker. I was overjoyed when I discovered that Tori Amos gets English Marlboro Lights shipped across to the States when she’s on tour. When former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy admitted to having been an alcoholic, I didn’t think there was any further up he could go in my estimation – that was, until he was fined for smoking on a train – which makes me think that he’d make an excellent Prime Minister. Somehow, when our heroes show their flaws, it makes them human, and we love them all the more for it.
Is this a part of the lure of the smoking fetish? Answers on a postcard…
