I will be 84 next month — even though I have smoked since I was sixteen. I started with five Woodbines and now I smoke Davidoff magnums which I have to get from Germany.
I recently told my doctor I smoke twenty a day, then about ten in the evenings — and I try and keep it down to five during the night. I also told him that I have had three doctors in the last fifty years. Each of them recommended I give up. But each of them has now died; the last one only a year older than me. My new doctor laughed and said nothing. He has a good sense of humour.
My father was a very keen anti-smoker, but he died at 75 because he ate too many chocolate biscuits. He was a diabetic who would walk up the street to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits and then eat them all in the park. This caused him to go into comas, which he did once too often and died of a heart attack in the hospital. He knew that going into a coma damages your heart, but he was a lot more worried about the smokers.
I knew this was completely irrational, but I also knew that he wasn’t alone. One of the reasons I moved to Normandy was because there are many people in England like him who are now trying to ban smoking. All of them are humourless bossy boots.
They are now trying it in Oxfordshire, which wants to become England’s first “smoke-free” county. I have no plans to go there. I was once invited by the Oxford Union to a debate on smoking, but I had to decline because of my deafness — although I did also point out that there’s not a hotel in Oxford where you can smoke.
It is the relentlessness of these people that has demonised smoking in England and America. Why are they listened to? It wouldn’t happen in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.
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