My Alphabet by Nick Hewer

Author:Nick Hewer [Hewer, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

N

Nicotine

How cigarettes kept me dangling, literally

My doctor was quite explicit about the potential side-effects of Zyban. ‘It’s been having quite a lot of bad press,’ he said. ‘There have been reports that some people have had fits, but none of my patients has so far complained.’ ‘I’ll have it,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a chance, because for forty years I’ve been regretting this smoking lark and now it’s sink or swim.’ He handed over the prescription and off I went.

I don’t know if Zyban is still available, but in my day, twenty years ago, you took a little Zyban tablet every day for ten days having made a mental note, but not a promise to yourself, that you’d be giving up somewhere in that period. So, there’s nothing definite, you can carry on smoking. I took my first pill and on day two I didn’t want to smoke anymore. I kept taking the tablets because that was the agreed regime, and at the end of ten days I stopped taking them and I’ve never smoked since. Thus came to an end four decades of misery that started with those Joysticks on the school train to Clongowes.

Looking back, I realise that my parents’ friends, quite a few of whom were local doctors, had all died in their fifties clutching a lit Craven A, claimed at the time to be ‘good for your throat’. At Clongowes, with your parents’ permission, you could buy cigarettes in a pack of tens or twenties in the tuck shop and you could smoke in the library or the billiard room after supper. The popular brand was Sweet Afton, made in Dundalk, Ireland, but named after the eponymous poem by Robbie Burns – ‘Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes. / Flow gently. I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise’ – which was written in flowery font on the front of the packet. Clutching your Aftons you would then retire to the old Higher Line library, which had a long central table and seats all around it, and in the far end by the fireplace, barely visible in the cigarette smog, was stationed the boy in charge of the radio. This he had permanently tuned to the subversive pirate station Radio Luxembourg, which would be immediately turned off if the face of authority ever appeared at the door. Bizarrely, smoking outside of the designated areas was a very serious offence and involved sliding into the hedges in the far fields and covering up the smell on your breath afterwards with strong peppermints.

When I first went to Clongowes, Joysticks – very, very long cigarettes – were a popular brand on the market, and to smoke those on the train on the way to school made one feel terribly cool and ‘hard’. We also wanted to smoke exotic cigarettes like Passing Clouds, oval cigarettes in coloured paper with gold filter tips, and Sobranie, once the supplier to the Imperial Court of Russia. But our whole smoking experience

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.