It’s odd how a bad habit is aped faster than a good one. So when Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco smoking in England for the first time in the 17th century, it was hardly surprising that the fashionable vice was destined to spread worldwide.
Recognised as a health hazard and social evil today, smoking is nonetheless still popular. The risks of “passive smoking” are well-known too, being rated as high as those faced by smokers themselves. And the “symptoms” of an inveterate smoker are all too familiar to most of us—nicotine-stained fingertips, a persistent smoker’s cough and the irresistible yearning for a puff after a meal or a cup of tea or coffee.
Like many impressionable youngsters, I was tempted to savour the “pleasures” of smoking while in boarding school. The inspiration came from our burly PT instructor, Mr Tomlinson, who used to burn up almost a third of his cigarette with each prolonged “drag” before exhaling interlinked smoke rings as we watched fascinated. Soon we learnt from one of our more worldly-wise peers that to look and feel “manly” one needed “a fag between his fingers!”
Once three of us decided to give it a try. We closeted ourselves in the toilet for safety and lit up, inhaling deeply and promptly erupting into an uncontrollable paroxysm of coughing and spluttering. Soon there was a sharp knock on the door and Mr Tomlinson demanded sarcastically, “Are you guys in distress—sending out smoke signals like Red Indians!” In a way we were, but the jocular Mr Tomlinson never reported us to the headmaster. Had he, we’d have been administered, with far more vigour than compassion, “six of the best” on our behinds.
Smoking, of course, has had its ardent votaries. A chronic addict, Mark Twain once declared, “It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.” Charles Lamb even expressed a fervent wish: “May my last breath be drawn through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.” In Tiruchi in the 1950s a joke centred round a chain-smoking railway driver who often bragged he could “out-puff” his steam locomotive! Indeed, many smokers swear that a good cigarette is as comforting to a man as a good cry is to a woman. And there’s also that sobering but paradoxical witticism: “Smoking kills live men and cures dead swine!”
Perhaps no one’s ever had a briefer romance with tobacco than famed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini who said, “I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day; I’ve never had time for tobacco since!”
For the compulsive smoker, however, giving up is never easy. As Twain irrepressibly quipped, “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.” Yet, it’s equally true that one never knows what one can do without until one tries hard enough–as I did. I am now a committed non-smoker, having shed the habit years ago.