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

pants at home with a Silk Cut parked between his lips, perhaps. Or Simon Cowell lighting up a Marlboro as he tries on high waist jeans in Gap.
    Or, you could start putting slogans on the cigarette packets like:
    WARNING! Your parents love to smoke and will be delighted you’ve started too, as they will be able to nick yours when you’re asleep.
    Or how about:
    WARNING! Smoking cigarettes will make you look like your woodwork teacher.
    Trust me, these ideas will work far better than vilifying smoking to the extent that every thirteen year old in the country rushes out to buy a pack, just to show how much they’re not like you .
     
    For the sake of balance and to show that Spalding does have the capacity to be unbiased when the mood takes him, I also have something to say to the cigarette manufacturers:
    Stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes, you greedy bastards.
    You know as well as we do smoking is a hugely profitable business and will continue to be so until it’s outlawed.
    You know smoking is bad for us, no matter how much you try to make out it isn’t.
    You can stop producing low tar cigarettes, trying to claim they’re better for us and are part of your effort to help smokers quit the habit. If that were true, you’d be selling them at a cheaper price , wouldn’t you?
    At least remove the high tar ones from the shelves, so we don’t buy them.
    But you don’t do this - claiming you're trying to give people a choice.
    Those little holes you’re punching in the filters aren’t fooling any of us you know. It just means it’s harder to draw on the cigarette and more difficult to suck the nicotine out, making us more likely to spark another one up straight away to get the same hit we’d get from one regular smoke.
     
    I’ve smoked since the age of eighteen, which puts me in the long term category, I guess. For nearly twenty years I’ve been puffing away on about ten to fifteen cigarettes a day.
    I’ve sat there and added up all the money I’ve spent, and thought about all the lovely things I could have bought instead. This is always depressing and I recommend to any smokers they do not attempt it under any circumstances .
     
    There are certain smokers out there who need a good, hard smack.
    I’m filled with a disbelief and impotent fury whenever I talk to a social smoker.
    I hate this lot more than the non-smokers who complain about passive smoking, or the ex-smokers who like to regale you with how easy it was for them to quit and how their sense of smell has miraculously returned.
    Social smokers say things like:
     ‘Oh, I only seem to want a cigarette when I’m out and about. Other than that, I just don’t bother.’
    You complete and utter bastards.
    How do you do it? How do you sit there on a Saturday night, merrily chaining your way through a pack of twenty and then not have another one for two weeks? How? How !?
    I’m not an alcoholic - rare for a writer - but I can sympathise with someone who suffers from it, when they see a half drunk glass of wine on the table at the end of the dinner party and think how can anyone leave that? It’s such a waste!
    I feel much the same way when a social smoker throws a packet of cigarettes away that still has two tabs left in it, just because it’s chucking out time at the Dog and Bucket.
     
    Comparing the two most popular drugs of choice, I loathe the double standard that exists for smokers and drinkers. Even though heavy alcohol intake seems to inevitably lead to violence and anti-social behaviour, it’s still the smokers who get all the grief.
    I don’t understand this, I really don’t.
    When you weigh the two up against one another, it’s plain to see that drinking is a far worse social phenomenon than smoking.
    Ever hear of any small, innocent children being run over and killed because the driver was smoking a cigarette? No .
    Ever hear of thousands of pounds of damage to property being done because a hoard of people - all smoking heavily -