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