In the early hours of this morning I got a mini-cab back home from East London. I had drunk more than Cherry Tango and was looking forward to my bed, but for some reason cabs had been scarce and I'd had to wait about 50 minutes for the battered car that would (hopefully) eventually get me home.
The driver was around about 50 and I guess he originated from somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea, but although he had a very strong accent I was unable to pinpoint it any further than that. He was friendly and chatty, but I would have trouble understanding what he was saying even if I wasn't drunk and tired.
He asked me if I minded if he smoked and I said that that was fine. It was, after all, his car (I'd have said he couldn't if he'd been in mine and I'd been driving) and I have been in enough cramped spaces full of cigarette smoke (it's one of my hobbies, getting in a cramped place, then having cigarette smoke pumped in until I pass out through lack of oxygen. I do it for the challenge and not the inevitable sexual excitement, like most other participants of the discipline), for one more to make no difference. In any case, although the car was missing some paint and possibly a wing mirror, it stil retained its windows, so I opened one of them.
The man proceeded to smoke his strong cigarette, hacking and coughing all the way through it. How much pleasure was he getting out of this? At what point do heavy smokers decide that the thing they are doing them is clearly causing them terrible harm and decide it might be time to stop? Not quite yet for this fella. Every puff resulted in an unhealthy, chesty hawk.
"I must give up," he commented (at least that was my best guess at deciphering the heavily accented comment), before adding, "Do you smoke?"
I told him I didn't. For some reason it's one of the few things that I've never been interested in getting into. It just makes me feel so bad in the morning, and also quite bad when I'm doing it. I didn't mention the cramped space with smoke being pumped in thing, partly because it would confuse the issue and partly because it is a fictional idea, created after the event.
He was very apologetic to have smoked in the prescence of a non-smoker, even though I had given him permission. "You should have told me," I imagine he said. It might equally have been "Your mother sucks rocks in Hull."
Though how he could have known about my mother's fictional holiday based hobby I don't know. Partly because it was unlikely that he'd ever met my mother and partly because the Hull-based rock hobby is another fiction. She actually sucks the rocks in Grimsby (Ha ha. I am funny).
I find it quite interesting that the man who wanted to give up smoking, but who still smoked despite the discomfort it gave him (which was so horrible that he was anxious not to impose it on an innocent non-smoker) continued to indulge this unpleasant habit. How our brains are able to understand something so clearly and yet our bodies or instincts can over-ride the obvious choice and allow us to continue with something that harms us.
This was something I was able to consider to greater effect the next morning, when I woke up with five days' hangovers crashing together somewhere in the centre of my own brain. The brain that doesn't want me to drink. But whose advice is willingly and cheerfully ignored.
Which suggests that I don't smoke, not because of the way it makes me feel in the morning (or I wouldn't drink either) but because I am simply not cool enough.
We shouldn't worry too much about any of this stuff; by the look of the exterior of his car, the driver is probably going to die in a road accident anyway. Let the smoking and the hacking and the hawking continue.
