About smoking

My balcony, bench and instant coffee jar.

Since my first grandchild was born, and I quit consuming alcoholic beverages, smoking small cigars (cigarillos) remained my only vice with any connection to purchased stimulants.

Since the late 1960’s, attitudes towards smoking, in general, have changed quite extensively. As a 15-year old schoolboy, I acquired the first experiments with tobacco products after purchasing a cheap pipe, which I hid from my parents in a tool compartment of my motor bicycle. I used to drive into a nearby forest, and almost cough my lungs out into numerous heather bushes that are so common in the middle parts of Finland. I suppose smoking pipe at that age was meant to make me look more mature. Well, as my favourite scientific author Kilgore Trout, quoted by another favourite of mine Kurt Vonnegut, so clearly could have stated: “The maturing influence of heather bushes is a commonly known phenomenon”.

In summer 1972, the year when the so called Interrail tickets were introduced, I made a one month train excursion to Central Europe with a good friend of mine. At that time, we both had a long blond hair down to our shoulders, jeans and wooden footwear called clogs. Because I was about seven inches taller than my friend, we acquired pipes that emphasized our differing body structures. He got a huge pipe with a large bowl that almost covered his face, and I found a small one hardly the size of my little finger. After all the testing, over the previous three years I have already so explicitly described, I still wasn’t that heavily addicted to smoking. Nowadays, if you light a pipe in a railroad carriage, you will soon find yourself smoking at a police station. However, at that time it was quite common and so, perhaps somewhere in the south of France, we once again lit our smelling personal things on a train. An elderly gentleman, who travelled in the same six person compartment with us, had of course taken a note of our appearances and had made his own conclusions. He must have thought we were smoking some dope, especially my little thing definitely looked very suspicious. He asked if he could also taste our stuff and exposed a pipe he’d been hiding in a pocket. Well, Finnish schoolboys weren’t familiar with anything extreme, and so I sincerely offered my tobacco purse at his disposal. For some weird reason, after smelling the content, he anyway rejected my friendly gesture, and conjured from somewhere a small plastic bag of his own. I suppose he had brought his own heather leaves for train entertainment.

Some years later, again I found myself smoking pipe in a student residence that I occupied with the elder brother of my Interrail mate, a pipe smoking student. We had a small table in front of an old TV, and on the table there was a drinking glass for all the bitter saliva that pipe smokers so generously produce. Gradually our glass was filled with yellowish gray substance that, as the Christmas was approaching, reminded us about eggnog. We even tried to entertain out guests with some homemade eggnog by just dribbling a tad of vodka into it. Anyway, as far as I remember, no one was dumb enough to taste.

Ten years later, when I already had a dental practice with two other young dentists, smoking in a working environment was still quite common. Only a few years later it became a criminal offence to light a cigarillo even in the smallest closet, if a cleaning lady had access to it. However, in the early 80’s, a couple of times a day, I used to have a cup of coffee and a small cigar in our dental lab with a dentist colleague, who by the way is about six inches taller than I am – quite a difference between my Interrail pal and him. At that time, disposable gloves were only gradually becoming mandatory in patient work, and much of the stuff was performed bare handed. Today my hair goes stiff if I just think about it. Smoking of course is a stinky process, and tobacco smell grabs your fingers like old fish. For saving my patients from bad smelling fingers, I used to hold my little cigar on a usual metal fork that I had confiscated from the kitchen and splayed two pegs to capture a cigar. At some point I used to do this also at home, although smoking at home wasn’t as entertaining as at work. Years later, after rotating our old tableware to my parents’ summerhouse, my mother sometimes mentioned a weird way some of our cutlery was mutilated.

Traditionally, big cigars producers have a field day when a child is born, and thick, fat, and mostly useless cigars go for distribution. The thicker the cigar is, I would say, more likely the celebration refers to a male kind of genital construction of the newcomer. So, I don’t know if my small cigarillos would have had any say is that game. Two of my own children are girls and the one in the middle is boy. I just wonder if actually at the time when the one in the middle was conceived, I had a period of either not smoking at all, or alternatively smoking bigger cigars. If I only remembered this, perhaps it would be possible to conclude if small cigars contribute to a better virility of female producing sperm, or did my possible abstinence from smoking actually promote the one in the middle. I hope this again is not a matter of size.

In today’s world where CCTV is following your every or every second move, telephone hacking by press or police is strictly regulated, and political parties which never before had even a slightest chance, are taking over, it has become almost a capital crime to smoke indoors. In some Nordic countries they are even discussing to prohibit smoking on private balconies. Well, of course it all makes lots of sense alone for environmental, national economy, and health reasons. On the other hand, I still get some wild, forbidden fruit kind of satisfaction, or excitement when I open the door to our balcony, which still is my private smoking zone. Wrapped in my old fluffy bathrobe I take an icy seat next to the wall letting my eyes fall on the setting sun of wintery Manchester, UK. In a freezing wind I’ll light my cigarillo holding a hot mug of instant coffee in my other hand. Of course there is an old instant coffee glass jar, now half full of cigar butts, waiting for me, and I have to open it with stiff fingers for not leaving ash marks on the balcony floor. The wind makes my cigar burn fast, and in about two and a half minutes I’ll be back inside brushing snow from my still relatively blond hair. Nowadays I don’t even consider going back to smoking pipe. Two glass jars on the balcony floor would be far too much.

 Balcony in winter