I smoked my last ever cigarette on March 16th, 2017. I’m coming up on nine years as a reformed Silk Cut devotee. Whenever anyone congratulates me on my nine smoke-free years I feel compelled to admit that my father died of metastatic lung cancer – a direct result of smoking – in 2008 and I continued to puff away for almost a decade.
I gave up smoking, not because of this tragic and traumatic family history, but because I wanted to. I hadn’t planned that my last cigarette would be my last. I just remember feeling slightly sick on a smoke-heavy night out, looking down at the fag in my hand and thinking “what am I doing?”. I felt grey and filthy; I decided to try a week without smoking, which turned into a month and then two, and I quickly became more addicted to totting up the time-lapsed-since-last-cigarette and money-saved-since-quitting. I briefly used nicotine gum and a leaky vape pen to buoy me up on nights out, but both were so disgusting that cold turkey was the preferred option.
In recent months I’ve been feeling the devil call of the cigs more keenly than any other time in the past nine years. There have been plenty of times that I’ve missed it. I used to love nothing more than a fag with a glass of wine. I adored sitting on the grass in the sun at a music festival, puffing away, safe in the knowledge that I had another five packs stashed away in my tent. Most of my friends smoked throughout our 20s and into our 30s. It bonded us. We enabled each other. It was a vital part of our social connection. In the years since I quit I’ve managed to drink the wine, go to the music festivals and have the social connections without going back on the smokes, so what now is whispering to me on the wind after all this time?
It’s the celebrities. It’s the young, hot celebrities smoking away to their hearts’ content. After many years of clean eating this and kale that and Gwyneth Paltrow steaming her vagina, the next generation of A-listers are embracing cigarettes again and I’ve got mortifying middle-aged envy. Pop star Charli XCX “served” cigarettes at her wedding in Italy last summer. The photos emerging from awards show after-parties are dripping with smokers, only too pleased to pose with a lit ciggie between their lips. Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, the lead actors from Heated Rivalry, are giving James Dean a run for his money with cigarettes tucked behind ears as they exit blacked out people carriers. They’re young and they’re hot and they think they’re invincible. I smoked enthusiastically through my teens and my 20s, consequences be damned. There’s obviously never a good age to smoke, but I do find myself longing to be back there, brimming with youth and unburdened by fear. It’s an undignified yearning, I know, especially when I fantasise about helping myself to a Vogue from a tiered stand at a post-Golden Globes rager while Timothée Chalamet wets himself at a joke I’ve made.
Deeply concerning, of course, is the impact of this resurgence in the aesthetic appeal of cigarettes on younger people. I at least have the benefit of hindsight and maturity to know that smoking is categorically not cool. However, if I was 18 or 21 or 25 and photos of Hudson Williams or Sabrina Carpenter lighting up were flooding my Instagram feed, I’d be straight into the nearest newsagent. It’s not as if Gen Z aren’t smoking or vaping, but the pivot to unapologetic cigarette use in popular culture is undoubtedly problematic. Maybe this is what happens when we tell our young people that the world is burning and we’re not going to do anything to stop it.
[ ‘It’s important for ice hockey players to be clean!’ I jot down during Heated Rivalry’s shower sceneOpens in new window ]
Scientists say that the earlier you give up smoking the less likely you are to die from related illnesses. I’m glad I packed it in well before I turned 40, thus reducing my likelihood of a smoking-related death by 90 per cent. Giving in to my midlife crisis yearning to return to the cigs would be irresponsible and, quite frankly, mortifying. My poor Dad, his addiction dating back to a time when smoking was aggressively marketed and encouraged, managed to quit when he was 50. It was too late. By 55 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and he died a few months after his 60th birthday. A cautionary tale if ever there was one. Imagine I failed to heed it and went back on the fags because Charli XCX “looks cool” with a packet of Parliaments. Mortifying.