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