I suppose in 100 years’ time, perhaps much sooner, no one will smoke. So we will be back where we were before the 16th century, when adventurers like Raleigh brought the Red Indian habit of smoking tobacco to Europe.
I suppose in 100 years’ time, perhaps much sooner, no one will smoke. So we will be back where we were before the 16th century, when adventurers like Raleigh brought the Red Indian habit of smoking tobacco to Europe. It was one of the points on which he intrigued Queen Elizabeth. ‘I can weigh tobacco smoke, Your Grace.’ ‘Oh no, you can’t, Sir Walter.’ Then he would produce a small pair of scales, weigh a bit of tobacco, smoke it, then weigh the ashes. ‘The difference between the two is the weight of the smoke.’ ‘Well I never, Sir Walter.’ Her successor, James I, hated smoking, wrote a book denouncing it, and would have banned it. But that would have meant losing the duties on imported tobacco, so he dropped his plan. It’s odd that Americans have led the campaign to end smoking, now being followed all over the West. When the first American colonies were founded from England, tobacco was virtually the only crop they learnt how to grow which Europeans wanted to buy. Without it, they could not have survived, and the United States would never have come into existence. Its origins were built on the weed.
I suspect smoking is one of those indulgencies which, bad in themselves, prevent human beings from doing worse. My friend Vicky, the cartoonist, used to get through 80 fags a day. He knew it was wrong and, with a great effort of willpower, stopped. But the deprivation increased sharply his already powerful melancholia, and his insomnia, and in due course he took too many sleeping tablets.
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