Another country
Scratch a utopianist, find a ...
THE Smoking Wars are burning in this household. I live with a man who smokes a cigar sitting in a canvas chair in the middle of a wheat field. He goes there in search of grey partridges, birdsong and solitude. If he lived with a more tolerant woman, he would smoke his cigar (Upmann Majestic from James J. Fox, origin Cuba, length 5½in, minimum smoking time 30 minutes and totalmente a mano—totally handmade) in the peace and freedom of his home.
Bold letters inside his box of cigars should drown out the song of the skylarks: Smoking can kill your unborn child, but, as this man is no Al Pacino (a new dad at 83), the warning is ignored as calmly as his family history. His father, a lifelong smoker, lost a lung to cancer (and continued smoking); his mother, a non-smoker, had a cancer associated with a long marriage of inhaling secondary smoke. The anti-smoking zealot he married (me) lost both her parents to ‘smoking-related’ diseases: heart disease and emphysema.
I see life differently. The letters emblazoned on the billboard of my mind are: Long live the Nanny State. I have my doubts that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan will ever take off, but I celebrate the move to make cigarettes hard for young people to get hold of. I believe it is exactly what a government should do. My fervour may seem strange from someone born in the last state to repeal Prohibition. I grew up on dirt roads that led to bootleggers and I witnessed from an early age the criminal mayhem to which unenforceable laws lead.
My memor y of those days is seen through the smoky haze of Camels, Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls, but I still can hear the soundtrack of Dean Martin, Peggy Lee and coughing: hacking, wracking, drumroll coughing. The only ‘no-smoking’ rules I recall from those days: no smoking in church and a lady never smoked on the street—a nostalgic taboo now that the sidewalk is the only place you can smoke.
I confess my ‘no-smoking’ furies hit a brief lull when I lived in France. I never lit a cigarette, but I loved the blue packaging of the Gauloises and Gitanes, I viewed the cigarette hanging from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s lips in every scene of the film A Bout de Souff le as vrai ‘French’, even as I saw the irony of the title in English: Breathless.
Eventually, I found the cloudy aroma of Frenchness less seductive. I began to resent sitting in crowded cafés next to couples who smoked sans filtres throughout their meal. Years later, when I opened my own vineyard restaurant, it was the first ‘no smoking’ restaurant in England. I rejected a ‘smoking section’ on the grounds that sitting 6ft from a smoker is no healthier than sitting next to one. Reluctant to antagonise any customers, I s
