Despite the deliberate sabotage of thursday's lecture (I did it for the extra fag break), some interesting issues were discussed on the subject of smoking. Allow me to nail my colours to the mast from the off. I am a smoker. I've had the filthy habit for longer than I care to remember. I also understand that smoking is very bad for ones health, aside from the obvious risk of contracting serious illness, it takes longer to recover from coughs and colds, it can make you wheezy, I'm told it stinks and it makes you age prematurely (I am in fact 19).
Smoking is an unwise thing to do. So too, however, is binge drinking, mountain climbing and reading 'take a break' magazine. You may argue that these activities do not have an impact on other people's health, you would be wrong. Ever been 'offered out' by a moron for' looking at his pint' or worse still punched like our esteemed module leader? Ever heard of a rescue attempt going wrong for a bunch of mountain climbers who shouldn't have been up there in the first place? and as far as reading female pornography like the aforementioned publication, If that's not bad for your soul, then I don't know what is.
Pictured above is possibly the coolest man ever to walk the planet, Serge Gainsbourg, He chain smoked from the age of 13, had a heart attack at 45 and reconvened his habit when he was discharged from hospital. He eventually died at 62. As Denis Leary says in his show 'No cure for Cancer', 'Smoking takes ten years off your life. Well it's the ten worst years, isn't it folks? It's the ones at the end! It's the wheelchair kidney dialysis fucking years. You can have those years!'
Gainsbourg was a risk taker, an innovator and a free spirit. He walked the line. Smokers very often take a sideways glance at life, they seize the day. They have to, they may not be here very long.
Here is a list of famous smokers:
George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, J.R.R. Tolkien, Albert Camus, Bertold Brecht, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Miller, Vincent Van Gogh, Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo DaVinci, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Luciano Pavarotti, Keith Richards, John Lennon, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Frank Zappa, George Gershwin, Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro.
Here is a list of famous non smokers:
Anne Widdecombe, James Blunt, Ant and Dec.
Conclusive, I think you will agree?
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ReplyDeleteI love your post! You were writing this as I was adding mine - the power of a well placed expletive cannot be underestimated!
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it, since we've all gotta die anyways, we may as well die from something we've enjoyed in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteHow many people make themselves unnecessarily miserable with neurotic avoidance habits only to die of something equally gruesome anyways?
Let's face it: there are very few pleasant ways to die (and those few require a lot of planning and investment...). What's more, we are all pretty much guaranteed some kind of cancer if we hang around long enough. That's just how we roll in the West nowadays, with our grotesquely prolonged lifespans and the inevitable decrepitudes that accompany them... but that's a whole other issue.
The point is, the prospect of lung cancer doesn't bother me nearly as much as those of, say, Alzheimer's, or progressive arthritis, or a hundred other hideous degenerative problems that old people are expected to suck up as part of the 'benefits' of Older Age.
Also, just to nitpick: a list of famous people who smoked prior to the early 70s is, like... EVERYBODY, man. But then, that may just serve to reinforce your point...
In response to Al's comment...I totally agree about the dubious 'benefits' of old age, however, I don't take solace from the fact that I am inducing my own death voluntarily - I smoke for two reasons: 1. - I enjoy it, and 2. Giving up is just too damn hard...it would require me to change my entire routine, from driving to work, to drinking coffee, to meeting with the 'smokers' at lunchtime and I simply don't want to put myself through it...weak? Probably. Content? yes. The NHS 'stop smoking' ads are so generalised, depicting one's 'addiction' as a sodding gremlin! If a man with a neck like a butcher's dustbin on the back of a pack of cigarettes isn't enough to put us off then Gollum's poor relation certainly isn't!
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