Next month I will be 60. It’s an unwelcome landmark birthday as far as I’m concerned but they say that taking up a new hobby or pastime is a good way to combat the advances of old age. So I’ve decided to take up smoking.
It was either that or something physical such as cycling or jogging or walking football but, to quote Ronnie Barker in Porridge: ‘What, with these feet?’ Besides, older cyclists look ridiculous, serious runners tend to look ten years older than they really are and as for walking football… what’s the point? No, smoking is easier, more pleasurable, more relaxing and even allows me to multi-task. I can enjoy a Camel Blue while birdwatching, walking the dog or listening to Northern Soul – all of which I also plan to do more of in my sixties.
I do not intend to go back to the 20-a-day habit of my youth but there are certain times when a cigarette really hits the spot – such as before and after seeing Spurs lose, outside the pub on a summer’s evening or outside a bar in pretty much every other European country where there is a more relaxed attitude to the habit than here.
On a recent weekend break to Spain I watched happy locals chattering and laughing outside bars in Cordoba and Granada with a beer or wine in one hand and cigarette in the other and realised this is what I wanted. In Frankfurt, for a football match, I joined the throngs on the concourse and politely asked a policeman if it was okay to smoke. He obviously thought it was a stupid question and replied: ‘Yes, of course, this is Germany.’
I should point out I’m an ex-smoker rather than a novice. I blame the fact that I’m Jewish and turned 13 in the mid-1970s, so it was a year of bar mitzvah functions where it was customary to have a round ‘party’ tub of John Player Special cigarettes in the middle of each table.
Life doesn’t begin at 60, it’s a signpost telling you there’s only so many years left. So I want to enjoy them as much as I can – and that includes lighting up without feeling guilty
It was a golden age for smoking. Everyone had a fag or cigar in their hand so, as kids, we would grab a handful of free JPS filter tips and nip outside the Sir James Hawkey Hall or Lambourne Rooms for a smoke while the adults danced to bands with names like Melvin Shapnick’s Swinging Seven. Thus began a lifelong habit which was stubbed out, seemingly for good, around eight or nine years ago. But the urge never left me and in recent weeks and months I’ve been sneaking the odd cigarette, scrounged from an ever-decreasing number of friends who still smoke.
Of course, this is a decision that will upset, annoy, and frustrate my friends and family and no doubt prompt a lot of negative reaction – a blowback, quite literally, in this case. So let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Death. There’s no argument I can make against the inescapable fact that this is a risk. But at 60 it is feasible that I may only have 20 years left if I’m lucky and longer if I’m unlucky. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people in their eighties and beyond living full and active and happy lives. I, rather gloomily, do not expect to be one of them.
My parents didn’t smoke, yet my mum died of cancer aged 66 and my dad of a heart attack of 74. His parents lived till their nineties having smoked anything up to 40 a day. But I saw how Alzheimer’s kept my grandfather alive physically but not mentally, and I remember seeing signs of it in my dad. If smoking knocks a few years off a dementia-ridden old age where I become an unwitting burden on my family, then I’ll take that deal. Visiting my grandfather in a home where he thought I was his brother who had died 30 years earlier was a gut-wrenching experience.
It may be some way off but I already fear I’m going down that road, forgetting names, needing lists to get jobs done or repeating anecdotes. I call these lapses my Christopher Walken moments after forgetting the actor’s name in a conversation about movies. It haunted me and while it may seem silly to be convinced of impending dementia on that basis, that’s how it is.
Life doesn’t begin at 60, it’s a signpost telling you there’s only so many years left. So I want to enjoy them as much as I can – and that includes being able to occasionally light up without feeling guilty about it.
Of course, the decision to start smoking again is selfish, stupid, unhealthy and unreasonable. It is also a joyous, life-affirming, stressbusting and satisfying one.
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