Over the past few weeks I’ve been surprised by the number of famous faces I’ve seen smoking: Paul Mescal pictured puffing away with fellow actor Natalie Portman in London. Dua Lipa sucking down a ciggie before headlining Glastonbury’s main stage (congrats on your golf magazine debut, Dua). And Dan Brown ripping through the cancer sticks the other week on his way to a top-10 finish at The Open in Troon.
I was a smoker once. I was only 11 but got the itch after seeing the joy a pack of 10 Carrolls would bring my brother after a heavy night on the sauce. I’d head up the road in his stead, armed with a hand-written note for the shopkeeper to please allow me to buy one pack of lung darts on his behalf, along with the rest of his hangover cure comprising a Tangle Twister, Lucozade and a packet of Skips.
Naturally the note never failed. Why would it? I didn’t look a day over 8. Didn’t know how to smoke, even if I wanted to.
Oh, how I wanted to. I’d tried the Twister and the Lucozade and the Skips, and while the latter was a tastier version of holy communion, the over-18s warning on the packet of cigarettes aroused an unhealthy want in my mischievous bones that could only be satisfied by the prohibited inhale.
So, one day I braved my brother’s skunk lair and snatched a cigarette out of his pack. My God I never felt so powerful. I called round to my equally curious 11-year-old friend Declan to show him the goods. Felt like the gangsters in those movies – the ones I shouldn’t have been watching – packing heat.
We went back to my place where lighters were in hot supply given Mam had more candles burning for causes than you’d see at an Easter Vigil. And without further ado, into the garage we went, sparking up our forbidden fruit and sucking down its sour nectar as tears (of joy?) streamed down our puzzled faces. Was that it?
Then Mam walked in.
She’s always had the nose of a bloodhound, my mother. I can still remember her sniffing her way into the garage with the accusation: “Are you smoking?” Some gall she had asking that of two children supremely confident they’d discarded the evidence in the nick of time.
Who thought you’d have to stub out the cigarette?
As we stood firm in denial, over our shoulder, smoke billowed from the towers of commemorative programmes Dad had hoarded from the Papal visit in 1979. He acquired them with the intention to one day sell them at great profit. Instead they took up a heap of space rotting in the garage. If only Mam let that cigarette burn. Could’ve done us all a favour…
Fast forward twenty odd years and it seems cigarettes are back in fashion with Brown the latest golfer to receive rockstar status online for punching a few darts mid-round. Already this summer we had LPGA star Charley Hull earning pundits’ plaudits for smoking on the job. Before that it was Long John Daly, and before him it was Miguel Angel Jimenez, though smoking a fat stogie in celebration will always be a boss move.
I guess sometimes bad is good and, in a time when athletes are supposed to be finely tuned, and smoking is banned in the workplace, maybe it’s through a nostalgic lens that someone smoking a cigarette can remind us of what it used to mean to be cool.
After all, when you tune into elite sport, the last thing you expect to see is an athlete enjoying a long drag. Then again, the last thing 11-year-old me expected to see barging through the garage door was my mother. In her own house of all places.
She was surprisingly calm all things considered. She didn’t even make us finish the whole pack to teach us a lesson. Just sat Declan and myself down at the kitchen table and told us, over coffee, that cigarettes weren’t called coffin nails for nothing, and if she ever caught us smoking again, we’d go to jail.
I can only hope Brown, Hull et al will be so lucky.
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