Matt Hancock has a slight look of head prefect about him, which is why it is so difficult to for me to take him too seriously. It’s probably hugely unfair, but, where I came from, head prefects tended to rise without trace, and then sink without regret, until they ended up as a partner in some law firm, or in a low-security prison.
Due to some major flaw in my character, I have always been drawn towards doing roughly the opposite of what people like the Health Secretary tell me to, quite often just to provoke a reaction. Until a few weeks ago, that is, at which point I decided to do almost exactly what he asked me to do, in order to try to avoid catching and spreading what looks, at best, a disease well worth avoiding.
Then yesterday, after a 20 year absence, I decided it was probably a good time to start smoking again, partly because it would annoy the Head Prefect, and partly because David Hockney, and some Chinese and US statistics point towards smokers having a higher survival rate of Covid-19. Mainstream scientists dispute this, which seems a bit disappointing, a case of ‘if we can’t have the football, then you’re not having it either.’
The way I look at it is this: tobacco smokers have had a lousy century so far, with usage in the UK going down by a full 20% since that awful moment when Cherie Blair gripped the queen’s hand in that grim rendition of Auld Lang Syne at the Millennium Dome. And Mr Hockney’s persuasive opinion tells me that now is the time to get going again.
There is so much happiness to catch up on. The glorious kick-starting of my lungs on the way in to work; the furtive coffee break gasper out in the car park; the exquisitely timed Gitanes, pretentiously smoked just because I was on a pavement outside a Paris bar; and, best of all, the expertly hand-rolled parcel of delight on a chairlift, surrounded by some of the most offensively clean air in Europe.
Charlie B said that I used to smoke ‘like a provocative girl’ and, for the last 10 years that I had the habit, people assumed that my preferred brand was ‘O.Ps’ (Other Peoples’), which it absolutely was. Basically, each one I managed to take off someone elongated their lives by the same time it took me to smoke the thing. Job done.
Fundamentally, I am looking for an achievement or two that I can boast about when we are uncaged at some point in the future. Baking flickered and died, and my embrace of online banking doesn’t seem to impress others as much as it does me.
But deliberately taking up smoking again- that would be a great story for the Head Prefect, for David Hockney and, in time, Saint Peter.
Lead me to the tobacconist, if he still exists, and if I’m allowed in there.
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