Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Being anti-smoking damages your mental health

Ten years on from the ban, the fanatics still want more

I lit a cigarette in an open-air car park a couple of years ago as I was walking to the exit. I noticed a Nissan Micra heading towards me from the far corner and thought at first it was going to run me over. But it pulled up alongside and a woman put her head out of the window. ‘Do you realise that other people have to breathe in your smoke,’ she snarled, ‘including people like me, who have cancer.’ There was nobody within 50 yards of me, apart from this deranged woman who had driven double that distance simply to register her hatred.

I wondered for a while about the root of her rage and its curious displacement on to me. I could imagine her feeling piqued that it was she who’d copped the tumour, despite having lived a blameless life, and here was this apparently healthy uncancered individual who was doing the worst of all possible things, i.e. smoking. I suppose I could have tried to make her feel better by telling her that I was impotent, my teeth were falling out and I had gangrenous feet — all stuff which the cigarette packets warn you about these days. That might have cheered her up.

There is something weird about anti-smokers. I got into a lift at the BBC once with a cigarette in my mouth and a woman started coughing, apparently uncontrollably. And wafting her hand in my direction. Fair enough if the cigarette had been lit, but it wasn’t. It’s a kind of neurosis, isn’t it? A little like what George Orwell said about anti-racists — people who define themselves purely by their implacable opposition to something.

About 12 years ago I was drinking with friends in a London bar when an American man wandered over and said: ‘I don’t care to breathe in your smoke.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in