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.
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