The Joy of Smoking

I started smoking at 15, basically because it was still seen as cool by the yoof in the late seventies and early 80’s. I managed to give up for nearly 7 years, but I missed it.

I still enjoy smoking – in moderation – and as I reflect back on the history of Western civilization I think I have spotted a relationship between tobacco use, the development of modern self-reflexive consciousness – and hence the birth of what we now call the modern mind. I personally think that the decline and wide scale banning of tobacco use has serious repercussions for the maintenance of our basic humanity.

It was the South American shaman’s who first cultivated tobacco and traded it to the world. As is well documented, the Egyptians and the Greeks were heavy smokers - Plato was an eighty a day man - and the decline of the Roman Empire happened because The Goths and Visigoths repeatedly blockaded the ‘Tobacco road’ as the historian Gibbon has recorded.

The Catholic church were abstainers obviously, and it was only when Leonardo began cultivating it himself and ignited the Renaissance that humanity took a quantum leap once again.

Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Swift, Dickens, Einstein, Picasso, Stephen Hawking (when younger) Neil Armstrong, Bill Hicks, all were addicted to the weed. There was of course a world wide tobacco drought in the years preceding the first and second World wars.

Post war, it was the French of course who revealed the importance of the ciggy to our very souls.

Those Parisian Café’s, clotted with the smoke of Sartre and Camus’s Gitanes, were the intellectual breeding ground for the Beats and the lighted match to the 60’s counter culture. Modern writers of that ilk like Will Self and Martin Amis can often be witnessed rolling their own in literary sympathy.

The humble ciggy provides pause for reflection, an existential moment.
It represents the symbolism of a single human life contained in that little white tube: the ignition of our birth, the slow burn of our histories which can be stubbed out in an instant, the loss of innocence with the nicotine stain of experience, and the slow, inevitable crumbling ash of our slide into decrepitude and death. All is vanity.

How many times has my sanity been saved (or yours) by the ciggy after some trauma - that late night phone call, the hospital loitering, the hideous final demand, the romantic breakup.

Or the simple pleasure of the post-coital smoke (I have had sex once) the after dinner burn, the boredom bashing fag break at work.

The last hope for mankind now rests with all those huddled despised little groups outside the Jobcentre, your local pub and Netto’s car park.

Spark one up with me in celebration of the past and the hope of a new tobacco Renaissance.