Smoking is good for you

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting to one of the owners of my favourite curry house in the restaurant's rear garden and offered him a cigarette. He is only an occasional smoker (a term almost exclusively used by smokers who prefer others to buy the cigarettes they smoke). On lighting the little vitamin stick he inhaled deeply and let out a contented sigh. It is the same sort of sigh I emit at the end of breakfast when I take my first ciggy of the day, only louder and longer because it was a rarer treat for him than it is for me. He did not collapse in a heap or start gibbering, he did not feel the need to steal to fund his next hit; he just sighed. He enjoyed the cigarette. As a smoker I find it impossible to describe the pleasure because it is just part of everyday life, but seeing my friend react as he did reminded me that smoking is a pleasure.

Anti-smokers plug two lines relentlessly. They tell us we only smoke because we are addicted and that smoking is bad for our health. The second might well be true, at least for some smokers, the first is undoubtedly and patently false. If it were the case that smoking is undertaken for no purpose than to feed a drug addiction, I find it impossible to see how it could be such a widespread habit. All over the world people smoke tobacco even though it is not a plant indigenous to their country. They do so despite it costing them money they can ill afford because it gives them something they did not have before. Addiction cannot develop from one taste alone, so even if they do become addicted over time, in the period before they are addicted they smoke solely because inhaling tobacco smoke gives them a pleasure they value at least as much as the money they spend to acquire cigarettes.

One can liken smoking to watching sport or films on television. You can get some for free but if you want more you have to pay. Your choice is to balance the pleasure you derive against the cost. If films don't really toot your flute you might not be prepared to pay anything more than the annual television tax because the number shown on non-subscription channels leaves you satisfied. If you find football and cricket utterly fascinating and can think of nothing better than to spend your evenings and weekends absorbing sporting encounters, you subscribe to Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, ESPN and anything else you can get pumped into your telly.

There is no objectivity about these things because they are matters of personal taste. Some opinionated prig can lecture you about how wasteful it is to spend so much time gawping at the idiot box but in doing so they merely expose their shallow-mindedness. They assume that because they don't do something themselves so others can't possibly get a benefit from it. They assume you to be incapable of forming your own judgment about what is valuable to you and how much you are prepared to pay for it. In short, they fail to realise that we are all different and have different tastes. If challenged to explain how you can justify the cost of numerous optional television channels your answer can only be that you enjoy it and consider it worth the money. No one is in a position to say you do not, cannot or should not enjoy the activity because it is your choice and your choice alone. If the price goes up you face a new choice, should you cut back so that your other bills can still be paid or should you continue the same subscription and make your wife go back on the game; it is the same balancing exercise - how much do you, an individual person, value the film or sports channels. Bert next door might take a different decision but that is neither here nor there, he is not you.

Smoking is also akin to drinking tea. Tea is consumed not just because it contains caffeine, indeed decaffeinated versions are available, it is drunk because ... well, why? The taste? That it is hot? That it is traditional? Frankly, it does not matter. If you want a cup of tea have a cup of tea, you know it will make life better for you even if others cannot stand the stuff. I doubt that any of us can really define the pleasure we get from a cup of tea other than by saying we like it. People might derive all sorts of pleasure, it really doesn't matter. They drink it because it gives them something at a cost they are prepared to pay even if they cannot identify the benefit with any precision.

We can be absolutely certain that people derive a benefit from smoking. The sigh in the garden of the curry house is proof of that as is the prevalence of smoking as a habit all over the world. The one certain downside is the cost. Every smoker has to balance the pleasure he gets against affordability. There is certainly some evidence that smoking can cause health problems for a small number of smokers and no smoker can know whether he or she is at risk. Provided we are informed of the risk we will take it into account alongside price when balancing whether the pleasure we derive is sufficient to justify continuation of the habit.

What is so extraordinary is that the risks are exaggerated enormously these days and some alleged risks are so statistically insignificant as to be pure invention. People know of these non-risks and believe them to be risks, yet still they judge that the pleasure they receive outweighs both cost and risk. If anything, that shows that the pleasure is far higher than any anti-smoking prig could possibly understand.

Yet still they tell us "it's no good for you". Sorry, Mr & Mrs Prig, you couldn't be more wrong. Smokers, like gogglers of movies and televised sport, judge for themselves what is good for them. On one side of the scale they place cost and alleged risk on the other side they place the pleasure they derive. You can measure cost in money but risk and pleasure are matters for individual assessment applying whatever measure any given individual cares to apply. Those who continue to smoke when ciggies are £6 and more a packet and so-called experts tell them they are killing themselves, their children, their friends, neighours and pets, explain by their conduct that smoking is very good for them indeed.

If you don't think it's good for you, don't do it. I haven't spent a single penny at a cinema for almost thirty years because I don't enjoy films sufficiently to be able to justify the cost - films are not good for me. During that time I have spent many thousands of pounds on cigars and cigarettes because I derive a pleasure from their consumption and feel the cost and risk involved are not so high that I cannot justify that expenditure to myself - smoking is good for me.

38 Pall Mall please

Non-smokers might not know that different cigarettes have different flavours. My particular favourites are a medium tar product of the Camel stable. Camel cigarettes are commonly available in three strengths, differentiated by the colour of the packet; yellow if you like them quite strong, blue if you like the medium strength and white-ish if you prefer something mild. I'm a Camel Blues man. They used to be called Camel Lights until some bright spark thought it was misleading to refer to any version of ciggies as "light". The thinking, if you can call it that, was that all cigarettes are potentially harmful and "light" could give the impression that they are not potentially harmful. It's complete hogwash, of course, "lights" - whether Camel, Benson & Hedges, Marlboro or any others - contain less tar and deliver less nicotine than the standard version. Whether that reduces their potential harmfulness is beyond my knowledge, but it does mean they are lighter in tar and nicotine than other available products. No smoker has ever been shown to have been misled by the term "light" but little facts like that never get in the way of official bigotry.

These days Camel are too expensive for me at £5.99 per packet of twenty. One of the great joys of visiting the USA, which I do every couple of years or so, is to be able to buy Camel Lights again. Another is that they cost half what they cost here. A third delight is that Camel sell a slightly shorter and considerably fatter version known as Wides, thereby allowing me to adopt my best Louisianna accent and proclaim "I's gotten me some Waaaaaaaaaaaaades".

The one thing you should never do in America is ask for twenty of your favourite brand. The shop assistant will react in one of two ways. Either they will stare at you in a state of complete bewilderment or they will plonk twenty packets on the counter. They don't order in twenties or tens but in packs. Over here, as you might know, the standard argot is to order either ten or a multiple of twenty. Ironically, on the very rare occasions I have bought ten they have been turned to ash and a cough far faster than it takes to reduce half a packet of twenty to the same state. So my practice is to buy one or more packets of twenty and to do so by asking for twenty, forty or sixty. Even in these days of dumming-down, the most arithmetically challenged shop assistant is able to work out how many packets need to be taken from the shelf.

Being a man with a dickey ticker my consumption of ciggies is now less than it used to be. I try to keep to just twenty a day and I buy every two or three days. A couple of years ago I switched from Camel Lights/Blues to a cheaper brand. The exact price of Camels at the time is lost in the mists of history but an indication of the disparity is that Camel now cost £5.99 for twenty whereas my new brand, Pall Mall, cost £4.25. Other cheaper brands were sampled, but only Pall Mall passed my taste test.

The week before last I received something of a shock to my already delicate system. I asked for forty Pall Mall, paid £8.50 and returned to FatBigot Towers to enjoy a nicotine fix. On opening the first packet something was seriously amiss. Cigarettes have always been packed tightly in their little box, like Russian virgins in a shipping crate en route to a new life as "waitresses". But these were not packet tightly, there was a gap, a highly noticeable gap. The packet contained not twenty but nineteen little tubes of addiction. My first thought was that something must have gone wrong at the factory and that I was in possession of a collector's piece, like a stamp with the Queen's head facing the wrong way. But no, careful examination of the packet showed the number nineteen stamped on the side and examination of the unopened packet disclosed a tiny yellow corner on the outer cellophane wrapper on which the same number appeared.

The following day I returned to the shop and pointed out this sad fact to the owner. At first he didn't believe me but a careful look at the stocks still on his shelf corroborated me. He couldn't believe his eyes and assured me that there was nothing to alert him to this radical change at the cash-and-carry. Since then I have bought Pall Mall at other shops and pointed out that they only contain nineteen cigarettes. At only one store was the person serving aware of this fact and she said it was brought to her attention by another customer a few days earlier. The latest batch of Pall Mall have the price printed on the cellophane covering, it is now £4.22. A reduction of three pence in price in return for a five percent reduction in volume. I'm not complaining really, they are still markedly cheaper than any other brand, but it is a bit cheeky.

Yesterday I needed to re-stock and asked for "thirty-eight Pall Mall please". The look on the face of the assistant made me feel as though I was in America again.