Great Uncle Fred? My Uncle Bruce is a mystery to me. He’s old (he’s my Mum’s brother) but he still does loads of stupid things. The stupidest, I think, is smoke fags. I asked him why he smokes fags. He said, ‘Well, Jack, you know, you have one and then you want another one, um, you know, they’re relaxing...’ and he trailed off and turned to Mum to tell her about his new fitness regime. Everyone knows that fags are not good for your health! Uncle Bruce wants to be healthy. He could give up (he boasts about having given up before). So why does he do it? Why does anyone? There seems to be no reason. Why do people smoke fags? (Jack, Autumn 2007)

Why do people smoke fags? Well, I smoked cigarettes during the War. It’s true. We all smoked. It was thought that cigarettes gave us courage. An order went out during the Italian campaign, so it is said: `We need food and we need tobacco. In fact, we need tobacco more than food. Tobacco is more important than food. Send tobacco.’ If we all believed that cigarettes helped us fight, then cigarettes did help us fight. You see? I suppose many people smoke now for equivalent reasons - because they believe that cigarettes do something for them. And the existence of that belief is sufficient to make it a belief worth having. If you feel that looking out of a window smoking a cigarette is somehow more romantic than just looking out of a window then you are, to a certain extent, right. And smoking, with its combination of deep self-absorption (inhale) and self-obliteration as the smoke disperses into nothingness (exhale), can certainly be seen as a romantic practice. But the real reason why nearly 25 per cent of grown-ups, even now, smoke so many cigarettes day after day is that they are addicted. They are drug addicts which means that they need their drug to feel as normal as they felt before they to took the drug in the first place. Smoking, with all its romanticism and the elegant poses that people strike while smoking, and the play of smoke and the pleasant aromas (some of them), it would be a delightful presence in society were it not addictive and of course deadly. But it is addictive and that is why people smoke, whatever they may say. Whatever the excuse - romanticism, concentration, relaxation, digestion - none of them is sufficient to explain why the smoker spends his last pennies on cigarettes and goes hungry. More important than food? Why yes! But how do you get addicted? You get addicted, strangely enough, because cigarettes taste terrible and make you vomit. Because you have probably tried them in order to prove yourself grown-up, the fact that your first experience of them is liable to be a disgusting and embarrassing one, is no barrier to your trying again. On the contrary, you must try again in order to prove yourself. It does not take long to get used to them by which time you are addicted and, more than likely, will carry on being addicted until, by a supreme effort, you give them up, or you die a smoker. If we were devils watching another devil organise the tobacco industry - and were observing the addiction, the poverty, the self-deception, the ghastly diseases, the death, the death, the more death - we would be laughing uproariously and applauding wildly at the tobacco devil’s ingenuity and daring! Nicotine addiction is something fiendish. Try not to fall into it. Don’t touch ’em! Not even once!

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