f r o m t h e e d i t o r
There was a time when smoking was a symbol of glamour , of blithe living and carefree dying . Now , in the age of sparkling water with lunch , goji berries for breakfast and decaffeinated coffee ( now , really what is the point of that ?) smoking seems ever more fossilised as a relic of a foolish and hedonistic past where people and doctors didn ' t know any better . Idiots who didn ' t wear seatbelts or crash helmets and threw their babies down the stairs in ginned-up binges . Smoking , like the smoker , has been excluded from mainstream society : forced out into the cold to shiver and receive the mucky splatter from passing buses like the communion of the politically-correct age .
The time has come for smoking and its proponents to be rehabilitated in the public consciousness : to be liberated from their chilly , red-taped ' smoking-designated zones ' and their bald-pated cancer wards . We do not live in the hyper-stylised , odourless scenes of Mad Men . We live today . We live next door . We go to your schools and eat in your restaurants and go to your churches . We are tired of barking orders at increasingly-clueless shop assistants in screenedoff kiosks . We are tired of busybody strangers clucking disapproval at us at bus stops for the simple act of smoking a cigarette . We insist on the value of our pleasures and it is high time that the cult of longevity was exposed as the joyless fetish that it is . We demand the right to live as we choose and to die coughing and atherosclerotic .
Smoking is a nootropic that enhances and exalts the life of the mind . It is the badge of the bon viveur that invites those around us to converse with us , to share a fug of witty exhalations . And it is the token of a life that prioritises the seriousness of pleasure over the culturallycarcinogenic seriousness of self that devours the healthy cells of our modern humanity , conviviality and sociality .
ROBERT HAINAULT EDITOR IN CHIEF
smokers ' manifesto 01