Smoking zone

As of this week my boy (17) is no longer legally entitled to buy cigarettes. His half-brother (16) the same. It must be galling for a teenager finally to reach an age when he or she becomes legally entitled to join the adults in one of their glamorous vices, to enjoy that entitlement to the full for several months, and then to have it peremptorily withdrawn again by a sanctimonious Scotsman.

My boy has only two months to go before he can service his addiction legally again. To bridge the time gap he popped across to Brittany on a cross-Channel ferry last week to stockpile a couple of thousand cigarettes. I went along for the ride and a breath of fresh air.

We weighed anchor in Plymouth just before midnight. My boy had booked the ferry tickets online. He’d booked us on a special offer for foot passengers. There and back in a day for 20 quid. The terms of the deal dictated that instead of a cabin for the outward journey we were to sleep in a ‘couchette’. What a couchette was exactly neither of us knew until we unlocked the door.

A couchette, we discovered, was a shared bunk in a dormitory full of snoring French lorry drivers. Privacy, such as it was, was afforded by a three-sided partition around each bunk. The partitions stopped about six inches short of the ceiling, allowing in artificial light and the various noises and gases that emanate from French lorry drivers when they are asleep.

The couchette section was situated in the bowels of the ship, just above the propeller shaft, I reckon, judging by the mechanical rumbling beneath us, and the rhythmic trembling of the cubicle partitions. The dormitory was stiflingly hot.