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" Even attractive young men adjusting their copious genitals failed to arouse my interest."
suffering: these laughing, drinking, smoking bastards. My hand flicked out like a chameleon ' s tongue snatching my wine glass. Drink more. Drink more. You can do this. Just keep drinking and it will be fine. But the pleasant Spanish plonk was as sand to me. It was incomplete without a cigarette and every sip reminded me that I should be smoking. Seconds later I was begging my father for money.
My father is not the soft, cuddly type and he resisted my pleading with what seemed, at the time, to be psychopathic ease. In that moment I hated him. I fantasised about leaping across the table and smashing him to death with the tormenting bottle of wine. I ' d take his wallet and abscond to Cuba to frolic in tobacco fields, the pungent leaves stuffed into my cheeks, a cigarette jammed into each nostril and a smouldering cigar protruding from my anus. I knew my father could easily overpower me so I would have to use the element of surprise and work quickly with the bottle to knock him unconscious before he had chance to fight back. While this orgy of violence played out in my mind, my fingers, rather than crawling towards the potential blunt instrument, feebly picked at each other ' s nails in the quiet semaphore of the helpless addict.
Dad decided to distract me but I had no interest in anything but smoking. Beautiful cigarettes. How could
anyone resist such a small and comforting pleasure? What kind of father was he to participate so diligently in denying me them? It was kindness, I knew, but of the longterm kind. I tried to think that my future self would thank him, but being my present self I didn ' t give a flying fuck. I wanted a cigarette and I wanted it now.
Four joyless days passed. As I sat on the beach my eyes were dim to the soft sand and the glittering play of the sunlight on the blue waters. Spotlights illuminated every smug, cackling, coughing smoker. Even the bodies of athletic young men padding along in their speedos or adjusting their copious genitals failed to arouse my interest. New arrivals yet to catch the sun with milky skin and alabaster contours of pectoral and groin couldn ' t divert me from my obsession. My predatory gaze, which usually would have scanned their flesh lingeringly, fixed like a sniper ' s sight on the dainty, glorious cigarettes pinched between their lips. I was going mad with lust for tobacco. I flicked impatiently through my book, scanning the words more quickly than I could absorb them, turning the pages ever-quicker until I threw it down in despair and hurled myself backwards into the sand to try to sleep.
For three more days I repeated this miserable ritual. On the third day I visited a chemist and, fumbling naively at the Spanish language like a stubborn bra I eventually managed to communicate enough to buy some herbal cigarettes. The fact that they even call them cigarettes breaches trading ethics. I lit my first stinking little stick and drew in the smoke. I felt like a leg of lamb. The flavour was like bad stuffing: herby, aromatic and completely unlike a cigarette. The harsh sensation of smoke that I had hoped would curb my cravings was woefully ineffectual. One after the other I smoked them, each one a fresh
smokers ' manifesto 13