19 disappointment, and as much as people complain that normal cigarettes make you smell, perennially reeking like a Sunday roast is far worse. I had gone cold turkey, filled myself with herbs and now I felt completely stuffed. People I met would subtly flare their nostrils and acquire a look of gentle confusion as they tried to figure out if I was a dope fiend or a hippie or an eccentric fetishist. I imagined them imagining me lining the crotch of my pants with handfuls of sage and rosemary and masturbating with sprigs of thyme prodding viciously into my scrotum. Had I thought such a practice might have distracted me from the torture chamber of existence I would gladly have tried it. By the end of the day I had thrown the herbal cigarettes into the bin and washed away the stench.
On the fifth day I had an idea. I had already planned to take the bus to Valdemossa while we were there. There is a monastery where Chopin and his lover George Sand had taken a cell and it seemed a logical site of pilgrimage for a musician such as me. Unsurprisingly, my father didn ' t want to come. A lengthy journey through the mountains to see an overpriced shrine to a composer he doesn ' t like was considerably less appealing than an easy day cooking himself on the beach. But I had no money. I would have to take lunch there in addition to needing the bus fare, plus a little for emergencies. Having resisted the urge to smoke, albeit under duress, my father gave me the money no doubt hoping I would use it as promised but sceptical about my willpower. He trusted me to go to the bus station in Palma alone and I was proud that, despite having the opportunity, I didn ' t buy any cigarettes. He had placed his faith in me and I wasn ' t about to discard that moments after he gave me the money. I ' d see how I felt when I got to Valdemossa. Maybe I wouldn ' t even buy cigarettes there.
The bus journey was long, the vehicle old, the driver reckless and the other passengers insufferable. We crawled along the precarious road in blistering heat as Spanish hits blasted out of the radio for two hours. A fat, sleepy lady whose ample backside spilled over the edge of her seat and into mine pressed her clammy exposed upper arms into me without a care. I focussed on the arid view from the window and tried to remain calm. The deep breaths I took to calm myself were over-oxygenated and conspicuously nicotine free. When I alighted the bus I burst out of it like a tomb, resurrected, full of optimism and the phrase ' Donde esta la Tabac?' loaded on the tip of my tongue.
I asked the first person I saw: a leathery bloodhound of a man with scrotal jowls. I must have sounded a little
smokers ' manifesto 14