Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir) by Nick Spalding Page A

months you’ve been thinking about not voting Tory anymore. You’ve been thinking about quitting the party. Giving it up.
    Nothing’s really been the same since Maggie left and you’ve just started realising how much tax you paid in the eighties.
    You only have one alternative: Labour.
    Sure, there are the Liberal Democrats, but if we stick to our smoking analogy, that’d be like giving up proper cigarettes to smoke those cheap herbal ones that smell like dog shit.
    …no, you’re right, I’d never make much of a political commentator.
    Now you’ve made your decision, you’d like to chat to your friends to sound them out.
    Applying the same attitude when discussing smoking, this is the response you’d get:
    All the Labour voters would tell you not to bother trying because you’ll be back voting Tory in a few months. All the Conservatives would recommend you swap allegiances immediately, because voting Labour is far better for you and puts more money in your pocket.
    You see?
    Crackers .
    Totally gonzo, in my opinion.
     
    Incidentally, the last passage represents the sum total of Spalding’s contribution to politics within the pages of this book. I don’t vote and never will, until such time as I’m presented with a political choice that is exactly that: a choice .
    All politicians in this country bleed into one as far as I’m concerned, with any real policies buried under a mountain of spin, sound-bites and sleaze allegations. Anything funny I could say about them doesn’t hold a candle to the kind of hi-jinks they seem to get into all by themselves.
     
    Anyway, back to the point:
    I’d like to say something out to all the anti-smoking organisations out there that spend millions of pounds each year trying to make us stop:
    There’s no point trying to educate us anymore. We know it all .
    Every smoker is now fully aware of how bad it is, how many chemicals there are killing us slowly and how it makes us smelly and unpopular at social occasions.
    You don’t need to spend any more cash on heart-felt advertisements, featuring wan ex-smokers hooked up to life support machines.
    The fact is, we know it’s a terrible habit and if we could stop, we would !
    All you’re accomplishing with your efforts is to annoy us incessantly:
    ‘Smokers! Look how awful smoking is! Why do you do it? It’s bad for you!’
    We bloody know !
    We may be smokers, but we’re also free-thinking individuals who can arrive at a conclusion without you ramming it down our throats at every opportunity!
    There’s no point in covering our cigarette packets with terrifying warnings about lung cancer and how smoking can harm pregnancy, because we’re still going to buy the bloody things anyway.
    They’re a drug. We’re addicted. Enough said.
    Why not spend the money you waste every year patronising us trying to invent a cigarette that contains no lung-killing chemicals?
    Even if they did invent a miracle cigarette like that, you’d have problems convincing the government it’d be a good idea. After all, I can’t see them being too pleased about all that tax they’d be missing out on.
    If the ones in charge really wanted us to quit smoking, they’d ban it.
    They have the power to do so and would, if the continued reliance we have on cigarettes didn’t fill their coffers each and every year to the tune of millions of pounds.
     
    There are ways that A.S.H and the rest of the cleaning living brigade can stop young people smoking in the first place. This is a far easier thing to do, provided you sell it in the right way:
    Kids start smoking because it’s cool. Fact .
    It’s cool because all the best celebrities do it and it shows just how rebellious and angsty you are - while you hang around outside the local One Stop, worrying old people and vandalising the bus shelter.
    The trick is to take that image away.
    Why not feature full page ads in the national papers of really uncool people having a smoke?
    Gordon Brown sitting in his