Tuesday, 6th December 2005.

Je ne cigarette rien

I've never smoked.

By "never smoked", I don't mean that I've never smoked properly, or regularly, or that I enjoyed the occasional cigar but never went on the tobacco, or that I had a few puffs once and thought it was disgusting, but <affects southern accent> "Ah did not inhale". I mean that I've literally never tried it. There were no secretive, adolescent fags round the back of the bike sheds between the first and second bell, no frantically brushing your teeth and chewing an entire pack of Doublemint in a desperate attempt to get rid of lingering bad breath - and no unpleasant scenes when my mother produced a half-used box of Embassy No. 1 that I'd absent-mindedly left inside my coat pocket (there was an incident with a condom wrapper, but let's not go there). And I never hung around shopping colonnades at dusk, pleading with responsible adults to buy me a pack of Superkings if I gave them the money. In fact the whole hanging-around-the-shops thing seems to have passed me by; I was too busy creating badly-sampled house music on my Amiga.

Someone with my upbringing - conservative and church-going if not overtly strict, with parents who don't really like credit cards or bad language - could perhaps be excused in this matter. I'm sure that if I were to see a psychiatrist he'd be only too keen to drag out the Freudian aspect of my early years and equate my general lack of spontaneity with a deep-rooted fear of its consequences, centring on parental discipline. But the truth is that my general avoidance of cigarettes has nothing to do with any sort of fear of my mother. It was merely that I really couldn't see the attraction. And to be honest, I still don't.

Where I might be willing to cave is that I probably feared a deterioration in my musical abilities, such as they were. I'd hardly claim to have been the world's greatest trombonist, certainly not since it was consigned to its case on an almost permanent basis (and, like some well-worn tree decoration that's been in the family for years, only reappearing at Christmas). As far as singing is concerned, it's the same thing: while I can carry a tune, I categorically do not and never have possessed the X Factor. At the same time, I was always aware that performance was an important part of the musical curriculum, particularly in my A-levels, and while I stopped short of the daily vocal exercises and bottled mineral water approach, I did try and take care of my lungs.

Another part of it can be equated with a fear of instant addiction: the nagging thought that if I tried it once I'd become hooked after the first drag. This is a ridiculous hypothesis - tobacco might be dangerous but it's not exactly heroin, and I don't think I've ever heard of anyone taking a puff and undergoing an instantaneous transformation from model youth to coughing and anti-social chain-smoker - but like most fears, it was powerful despite its obvious irrationality. So I blundered along, in a state of constant uninitiation as far as cigarettes were concerned. I was lucky enough to have friends who, by and large, didn't smoke - and the ones that did were considerate enough to avoid the peer pressure approach. The same thing can be said for drugs, whether hard or soft - I've never even tried cannabis, and the nearest I've ever come to narcotic stimulation was experiencing a very mild, vague feeling of mellowness after spending an hour in the company of two college friends who were getting stoned on a joint.

I should point out at this point that I'm not boasting about this. It's fact, and that's all. A very big part of me is grateful that I never went down that road, but another part of me - a small and slightly irrational part (which, like most irrational people, has a bigger voice than the sensible portion) - makes me feel that I'm not complete, somehow. This is a blatant fallacy and it gets easier to quash as time goes on and I feel even less inclined than ever to try smoking, but somehow it won't quite go away.

The reason I'm talking about smoking is that Mike, one of our manufacturing controllers, has decided to forego his regular fag breaks in favour of cold turkey (or perhaps a nicotine patch). He's four days in, and if the age-old myth that "day three is the worst" has any truth about it, he's doing remarkably well. We're all very proud of him, but I can't help thinking that I'd have more of a right to feel proud of him if I could empathise. My revelation that I'd never even tried it was met with a simple "You don't know what you're missing, James!".

"I'm aware of that," I said, "and to be honest it would be quite nice if it stayed that way."

Alison and Jon once told me that when Jon was giving up smoking a few years ago, his friend Craig tortured him in the pub one night by holding a cigarette in his left hand, and whispering in the husky tones of Emperor Palpatine, "You waaaant thissss...don't you...". Craig still has all his limbs attached, but it was a close-run thing. (Actually, Craig's ability to quote Star Wars until the cows come home has got him into hot water on more than one occasion: a few years ago he and some friends were driving to Mexico, and at the border control a thick-armed, burly guard with a moustache and sunglasses leaned in through the window, glanced at Craig's friend, and said "May I see your passport, please". Craig responded to this by waving his hand subtly and saying "You don't need to see his passport...". Arguably not the most sensible thing to do in the presence of a no-nonsense immigration official with a big gun.)

There's something else that's put me off smoking, and it's associated with the prospect of getting old. The other evening, Emily and I were discussing whether or not Mono would still be going when we were fifty, and whether we'd still be using it. Would our children be spods, or would they have abandoned the archaic text-based system in favour of flashy graphics and nigh-on total immersion in a digital world? We tried to imagine some of our friends and acquaintances at fifty: some visual images came easily and were aesthetically pleasing, while others filled us with a sense of proverbial horror.

Anyway. The point is that we have no idea how Joshua will turn out - I'd like to hope that I'll be a relaxed parent who nonetheless lays down rules, and I'm sure that I'll get more than a few things wrong along the way. Whether or not Joshua actually smokes, he will nonetheless one day be old enough to do so. And when Joshua becomes old enough to either smoke legally or to obtain cigarettes under the table, the thought occurs that if I tell him that I've never even tried it, he's simply not going to believe me. I can picture the conversation now:

"Listen, son, we love you. I mean, we can't stop you from smoking. We can't force you not to. But I think that you ought to perhaps be aware of some of the things that can happen to you as a result."
"I know, I know, we did it in science. God, Dad, you're so backward sometimes. I do know it's a risk, but I'll quit soon! Besides, everyone else does it. I'm sure you smoked."
"Believe it or not, I never even tried it. Never. Not once in my life."
"Ha! Yeah, right. You expect me to believe that? Next you'll be telling me you never got drunk either."

Actually I *have* been drunk, plenty of times, as anyone who knows me well can corroborate. Less so these days, and certainly not since becoming a father, but there was a time during my student days when - but enough of that. When I was younger, my father would tell me - not in the midst of a stay-away-from-the-bottle-son lecture, just in general conversation - that he'd never been drunk. To be honest, I never truly believed him - he had no reason to lie about it, but I couldn't help wondering if his memory was a little bit hazy on the matter, and that even if he'd never been really drunk, he must have been tipsy...surely? Apparently not. And the funny thing is that I've become more inclined to believe him the older I get, to the extent that I no longer hold any doubts as to the validity of his claim. My father used to pipe-smoke, a vice that was practiced even by my grandparents in the days when smoking was a relatively innocent activity, untainted by a million public health scares and all the lung cancer baggage. It occurs to me now that I've become like him, but on a parallel path: one smoked but never got drunk, and the other never touched tobacco but did (and still does) enjoy the occasional tipple (as well as suffer the odd hangover).

Part of me, I'm ashamed to say, feels a little bit smug about my tobacco virginity. I may not be the healthiest kid on the block, I haven't been to a dentist in two and a half years and I need to restart that diet with a vengeance to avoid the risk of heart disease later, but at least my lungs are clean. My favourite sketch on Trigger Happy TV was the one which featured a group of twenty-something males in cheap suits enjoying a cigarette break outside the front doors of a large insurance firm, only to have the pleasant atmosphere marred somewhat by the appearance of Dom Joly, dressed as Death, pacing back and forth anxiously and checking his watch. I can enjoy this without feeling the cold stab of recognition that comes with it, but as soon as that commercial for heart disease comes on I'm out of the room to check my weight on the scales.

I can't help thinking that by the time Josh is old enough to smoke, they may well have banned it completely. This will be no skin off my nose: I'm all for public freedom but as someone who never did it I couldn't care less if cigarettes were made illegal tomorrow. There's a tremendous hypocrisy in the government's support of smoking (yes, it is support - all the serious warning stuff is just two-faced moralistic pampering to please the health experts, and if they were really bothered about the fact that smoking killed us they'd ban it) at the expense of other, arguably less harmful drugs (or at least drugs that haven't been proven to be any more harmful than long-term cigarette use). It's amazing what a little VAT will do for your moral standpoint: if someone worked out a way to tax cannabis, I suspect that Labour would be all over it like a rash.

But there's another side to the nanny state thing: it's fine until it comes after you. What do you do when the thing you love (and thought harmless) becomes the thing that everyone else hates, to the extent that they want it banned? Smoking is one thing - but what about overeating? Hip Hop music? Violent TV? There's a line that needs to be drawn but no one knows where it is. And as I'm unable to empathise on the smoking issue, I remain ensconced on the sidelines, reluctant to engage in debates about smoking in public places (I've never had a problem with it as long as they didn't do it too near me) and remaining squarely, if uneasily on the fence - the simple truth is I don't really care, and for once I feel like I almost have a right not to care.

This will all undoubtedly change once someone I love gets lung cancer, or once Josh becomes old enough to smoke and actually starts doing it. And I can feel the wheels of my own hypocrisy grinding into motion when I compare my relative apathy vis a vis smoking with my less tolerant stance on alcohol abuse, for various family-related reasons that I won't go into here. But for the meantime I am merely watching and waiting and gathering evidence so I can work out how I feel about it later. I may have missed out on the thrill of the puff and drag, but this also excludes me from being drafted into the army involved in the Tar Wars saga, and for that I am grateful.

Do excuse me, won't you? I'm off to raid the chocolate machine…