Smoking

A letter to… The Guardian’s sanctimonious letter writer

This one is priceless, believe me. Truly priceless. For a long time now I’ve been buying The Guardian for its unintentional hilarity. Not just the columnists, but even more so the letters pages. This is from their fatuous Saturday family section: yes, it is a minor miracle that such a reactionary receptacle still exists at The Guardian. This is an anonymous letter from a reader saying something they’ve always wanted to say – they have one every week. If you have the time read it all – because it tells you what these people are really like underneath. These tolerant, caring, liberals. If you can get to the part about

Letters | 13 July 2017

Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the anti-Brexit campaign and the persistent underestimation of the United Kingdom’s strengths (‘Down with declinism’, 8 July). It is ironic that the heirs of the old 19th-century Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, are among its principal proponents, for declinism goes back even further than the 1880s cited in his article. Fearful of the advances demonstrated at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 by continental countries in engineering (e.g. the giant Krupp cannon) and the sciences generally, the Liberal minister Robert Lowe in 1870 opened the debate on the Education Bill —

Being anti-smoking damages your mental health

I lit a cigarette in an open-air car park a couple of years ago as I was walking to the exit. I noticed a Nissan Micra heading towards me from the far corner and thought at first it was going to run me over. But it pulled up alongside and a woman put her head out of the window. ‘Do you realise that other people have to breathe in your smoke,’ she snarled, ‘including people like me, who have cancer.’ There was nobody within 50 yards of me, apart from this deranged woman who had driven double that distance simply to register her hatred. I wondered for a while about

The smoking ban ripped the soul out of this country

It is 10 years since smoking in public places was banned in England. Ten years since officials decreed that we could no longer light up at work, in restaurants, in pubs and even at bus-stops. Ten years since you could follow your Tiramisu with the satisfying throat hit of a drag of nicotine. Ten years since pubs were fuggy and convivial, packed with hoarse ladies telling stories and old blokes propping up the bar rather than shiny-haired new dads wearing a baby in a sling and wondering whether to treat themselves to buffalo wings or mac’n’cheese balls. Seriously. Babies in pubs. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I hate

Dear Mary | 5 January 2017

Q. I have bought a second-floor flat which comes with a bow-shaped balcony which overlooks a communal garden. My problem is that I will want to go on to the balcony to smoke but I won’t want my neighbours to see me doing this. Nor will I want them to be able to see who is standing on the balcony smoking with me. Solution? — Name withheld, London W11 A. Why not take a tip from the late Lucian Freud? When the reclusive painter had his own bow-shaped balcony, he concealed his doings from neighbours with a 7ft high wall of tightly packed Chinese bamboo. This device allowed Freud to

The sexy new face of cigarette packaging

Something for which to thank the government, at last. It is much, much more fun buying cigarettes these days. It was quite good fun when they stopped having the fags on display and you had to play a kind of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game with the woman behind the counter. A bit like that section in Play School where you had to guess if it was behind the round window or the square window or the other window, a sort of arched regency type of thing. The woman scurrying hither and thither, pulling back shutters and scouring the shelves, not allowed to open all compartments at one time in case everybody suddenly

Warning: top-performing funds are highly likely to contain tobacco

Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and gradually reduce its €1.6 billion bond holdings in the sector. No surprise, given Axa’s role as a health insurer and the oft-repeated statistic that smoking kills six million people a year; indeed, you might think any health-related investor would have taken the decision years ago. Except that cigarette-makers have been stellar stock market performers since the beginning of the century: British American Tobacco’s shares have multiplied in value a dozen times while paying rich dividends, and Imperial Tobacco (now Imperial Brands) has been almost as good. MSCI’s global index of

Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets

Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and look, let’s just move along. Even so, were there ever to be found a Platonic form of such a place, or, as the beer adverts might put it, If Heineken Did the Flats of 1990s Middle-Class Student Drug Dealers, then I now know precisely what such a place would look like. It would look like a vape shop. To be more specific, it would look like the vape shop I visited a few weeks ago in north London. It was perfect down to the last detail. Paraphernalia all over the

Live fast, die not too old

As an old man, well past my Biblical sell-by date, I cannot for the life of me understand why increased longevity is received as such a universal blessing. One thing’s for sure; its celebrants are not the oldies themselves, so it is time someone challenged this assumption. Let me start with a parable. It concerns an Eastern European country whose parliament was considering a total smoking ban. In response, a consortium of tobacco companies demonstrated that the savings made in healthcare as a result of the decline in smoking-related diseases were chicken feed besides the reduced payout in pensions as the result of premature death — not to mention the

Long life | 21 January 2016

Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but it is now two weeks since I last had one. Initially I used e-cigarettes and nicotine lozenges to help me give up, but now I already feel I can manage without them. I think I may have conquered my addiction. I feel I could be free at last. But I hesitate to say so, because it is a feeling I have often had before. Like Mark Twain, I have often stopped smoking, but always after a period of time, even one as long as five years, I have taken it

She was Ariadne to my Theseus

My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their necks. When Trev starting vaping, I lost what little hope for the future of humankind that I had left. He puffs on his elaborate dummy non-stop when we go out. The first time I gave it a sceptical look, he took it out of his mouth and offered me the wet end. ‘Have a taste,’ he said. ‘Blueberry and cream flavour. Nice, isn’t it?’ ‘Ponce,’ I said. During this summer’s Spectator cruise, smoking was banned except on the starboard side of two decks. It was a bit of a nuisance,

The smoking diary of Gregor Hens

The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will Self in his excellent introduction, is ‘not being able to talk about it’. ‘Scriva! Scriva! Vedrà come arriverà a vedersi intero.’ ‘Write! Write! See what happens when you look into yourself.’ That’s the advice given by a psychiatrist in Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno, his 1923 novel about giving up smoking again and again, as per the line apocryphally from Mark Twain about giving up being so easy, he’s done it hundreds of times. ‘That was a very important last cigarette’ is, so to speak, that book’s essential joke,

A cure for Christmas: the pleasure (and perils) of preserves

My family knows that once the flaming pudding is on the table, late on Christmas Day, all meals will be picnics. Bar a few potatoes flung into the oven to bake, all cooking stops and eating becomes a forage into a squirrelled hoard of treats: the jars, tins, balsawood boxes and less pretty but functional vacpacs, inside which lie the delicate results of ‘cures’ achieved using sugar, salt, booze or smoke. Preserves are as much a part of my Christmas as the big fat bird and Brussels sprouts, only I find them far more interesting. Often they are memories of past Christmases. We recall the specialities our forebears once loved;

Dear Sirs and Madams

Those who write letters and send them by post are a dying breed. I was fortunate to have served as a newspaper columnist and received a great many. Often eloquent, sometimes humorous, their breadth and depth of experience was wonderful. With the exception of letters that were racist or completely mad, I tried to answer every one of them. If a reader took the trouble to write to me, it was the least I could do to send him or her a personal reply. There was the occasional correspondent from London, but most lived in the country or in provincial towns or cities. Most were Conservatives and many were lifelong

‘Quitting is suffering’

Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met. Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine vapour from an electronic device rather than a miniature bonfire between your lips. Vaping is driving smoking out at an extraordinary rate, promising to achieve what decades of public health measures have largely failed to do. And it is doing so without official encouragement, indeed with some official resistance. Via an interpreter, and sucking on an electronic pipe, Mr Hon told me how it happened. And here is the key point, the one that

Letters | 11 June 2015

The long arm of the FBI Sir: The White House may be less willing than it was to play the role of the world’s policeman in international affairs, but the FBI seems eager to be the world’s cop. No doubt, as Martin Vander Weyer has noted (Any other business, 6 May), the US Attorney General has been ‘careful to assert that many of the allegedly corrupt schemes of the Fifa officials so far arrested were planned in the US, and that US banking and “wire” services were used.’ Still, we are told that the FBI is also investigating matters such as the award of the next two world cups to

Big fat myths

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thehighpriestsofhealth/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Christopher Snowden discuss whether the NHS is too bossy” startat=35] Listen [/audioplayer] Like all failing projects, or popular cults, the NHS needs scapegoats. Britain’s health service is plagued by an endless stream of deviants who are a ‘burden’ on its resources. Otherwise known as patients, they are the drinkers, smokers and fatsos who, we are told, will bring the NHS to its knees unless lifestyles are regulated by the state. Smokers were a useful scapegoat for a while. Now it’s the obesity ‘time bomb’. As Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, recently put it, ‘The new smoking is obesity.’ He claims that fatties

Big Tobacco and the smugglers: do you believe this conspiracy theory?

In an information sheet on its website, the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association draws a link between the illegal cigarette trade and prostitution, arms trafficking and terrorism. Given the number of people killed by their trade, it’s hard to believe that the TMA is motivated by altruism. So why do these companies campaign against black-market cigarettes? One answer is that they eat into profits. But the scale of the problem also allows Big Tobacco to argue for lower taxes on its products. From the TMA’s website: The UK’s high tobacco tax policy has provided economic incentives for criminals to meet the demand that exists for cheap tobacco products. This has implications for Government revenue and for

The anti-smoking pressure group whose wackiest ideas always become law

Every few years, Action on Smoking and Health draws up a wish list of all the policies it would introduce if it was king for the day. It then spends the next few years lobbying ferociously and watches with a satisfied smirk as every single one of their brainwaves becomes the law of the land. The manifesto of this tiny pressure group is, in effect, the manifesto of whichever party is in power. The only difference is that governments often ignore their own manifesto commitments (such as Labour’s 2005 pledge to exempt private members clubs from the smoking ban) whereas the ASH manifesto is always implemented to the letter. ASH’s

Dear Mary | 28 May 2015

Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had failed to turn to the woman on his left when it was time to do so and instead stared vaguely down the table with his back slightly turned to her. She looked devastated. I wonder what I could have said, without sounding nanny-like, to remind this youth of his manners and his special duty, as one of those staying in the house, to make those locals who had been invited in feel particularly welcome. I know the man’s parents vaguely and they know how to behave, but I had never