In Dorchester during the Christmas holiday I bought a two-slice electric toaster at Currys. It was a nice little toaster that worked very well when I got it home. And it cost only £4.50, which turned out to be little more than half the price of a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. It’s some years since I gave up smoking; but at my peak I smoked three packets of Marlboros a day, which now would cost the same as more than five two-slice electric toasters. Or, put another way, with the money I have saved from giving up smoking I could buy nearly 2,000 electric toasters a year. I could by now be running a successful electric toaster shop. Given that smoking indoors is now forbidden in any public place, and that cigarette packets are plastered with grisly photographs of rotten teeth, cancerous lungs, and gangrenous limbs, it is surprising that anyone still smokes at all; and especially, given the price of cigarettes, that smoking is most prevalent among the poor.
Nevertheless, the percentage of smokers in Britain has fallen by more than 50 per cent in the past 40 years; and now I read in the Financial Times that cigar-smoking is also declining so fast that at present rates the cigar will practically have disappeared from Britain by the year 2026.
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