A Time Machine in a Jar

By far the best birthday present I got this year was a jar of Smurfs.

Yes, Smurfs. Those blue shirtless guys with the funny hats.

On the morning of my birthday after being presented with loads of cards all filled with money, after downloading the $50 Amazon gift voucher from my mum all the way in South Africa (spent on Goo Goo Dolls, The Fray and Madonna (for the wife) CDs), I opened the badly wrapped present complete with (rather random) piece of string.

At first I thought it was a jar of sweets or chocolates, which would have kept me in a movie’s worth of munchies and kept my dentist flush with future filling bills, until I realised that they were the exact same plastic Smurf figures Greg and I used to get at the petrol station. My niece had had them lying around and on the night before thought she’d wrap them up for me just because.

My eyes lit up and my jaw dropped open. Everyone in the room – even the kids – initially thought I was taking the piss.

I wasn’t.

When I was but a wee lad my mum, dad, brother and I used to spend almost every school holiday on my grandparents farm in Beaufort West – one of those small towns described as ‘one horse’ but also only have one policeman, one prostitute and about thirty liquor stores. It is surrounded by many large farms, so in fact it has many horses.

Anyway, the drive from Cape Town to Beaufort West would take around six or seven hours (this was before the Huguenot Tunnel shortened the journey considerably) and on the requisite stops for petrol, padkos and a piss we would receive a Smurf figurine.

I’m not entirely sure if my parents bought them or they came free with every tank filled (it was before I understood the concept of money… as in something other people always seem to have and I always seem to need), but we always got some.

That was around 1985, and now back in 2012 it was as though someone tied my brain to a football and I’d been booted back in time by Beckham.

Of course, the kids were chuffed by my reaction, even though they didn’t entirely understand it. It seemed kind of poetic to be surprised with a burst on nostalgia on my birthday.

I am the Smoking Jesus

You might as well tattoo a swastika on your forehead, because you’d no doubt garner the same contempt from little old ladies and mums-pushing-prams. You’re standing in the rain, while everybody else – all non-smokers – look out at you thinking, “Freeze, you bastard.”

But you put up with it because you’re a slave to nicotine. An addict. And the ten minute wait for the bus would seem like an age if you didn’t have your cancerous friend to suck down.

It is a universal law, though, that as soon as you light a ciggy the bus will round the corner. If you’re scabby enough you might nip it and put it back in the box – to hell with the stench – but most of us just grumble and stomp it underfoot.

Smokers, in England, are treated like lepers were a few hundred years ago. I’m sure if all the health freaks had their way we’d be chained and shipped off to a remote island where we could pollute the air away from their tender nostrils; killing only those like us with our secondary poison.

They now put pictures on the packs of all the horrible things it does to you - like a child sniffing it in; an open mouth with missing teeth and rotting tongue; and my personal favourite, a dead guy on a morgue table.

The thing is, if they did that when I was in school it wouldn’t have discouraged me. Rather, I would have collected the things like stickers for a Thundercats sticker book.

An ad I noticed put it into perspective for me. A yellow background with black silhouettes of a young lad handing a pack of cancer sticks to a younger lad (or a midget), and the writing: CHEAPER CIGARETTES MEAN IT’S EASIER FOR YOUR KIDS TO SMOKE!

Made sense, I thought. A lot more sense than the South African version telling you that cheap, illegal smokes fund terrorism(?). Yes, but the heavy ‘sin’ tax on legal ciggies funds Jacob Zuma’s third plane.

Like any addict gives a shit, anyway.

But it made sense to me, and I thought that it’s right to make smokers feel like evil outcasts if it means my future children will look at the habit with disgust.

It wasn’t like that in my day. Hell, James Bond was a smoker! But a decade or so ago they got Hollywood to only let Bad Guys tug on a fag. And no teenager wants to be a bad guy… well, unless you want to score with the girls your mother warned you about… and who didn’t?

It makes sense that Bad Guys would have bad habits, but so often the Bad Guy is more appealing than the Good Guy with his neat haircut and gentlemanly demeanour. The genius in making smokers smelly, yellow-teethed and rain-drenched is that it makes them us look like sad losers with no friends, obviously standing in the rain so that no one can see we’ve been crying over our pathetic lives.

I will happily stand out in the rain dancing with pneumonia if it means I will spare my children from future addiction. Stick a fag in my mouth and nail me to a crucifix if it helps.

Hopefully my sacrifice will save them.