It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and lying on our backs in a field. We have a packet of ten Silk Cut between us, and we are practising blowing smoke rings that will make us irresistible to boys.
Everyone we fancy smokes: Slash, Kate Moss, half the Lower Sixth at the boys’ grammar school. It might be 40 years since Richard Doll made the link between smoking and lung cancer, but we don’t care. There’s Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise with his cowboy hat and a Marlboro Red. Johnny Depp – smoking in every sense – in just about everything. It is, durrrr, a truth universally acknowledged that pretty much anyone looks hotter with a cigarette.
Through our late teens and most of our twenties, we then gravitate towards the clouds of smoke that fill every bar, pub, gig and house party in search of men who taste of Marlboro Lights. Sure, you need to wash your hair and all your clothes every day, but this is a small price for the effortless cool that only smoking confers. Besides, how do you even think about flirting without being able to ask – or be asked – for a light? It isn’t alcohol that makes sex happen; it’s the flickering flame of a lighter between two people in a dark corner of a club.
I love all the paraphernalia, too: spinning the wheel of the heavy silver Zippo, a present from my first boyfriend; stuffing a tissue-thin Rizla with earthy Golden Virginia when my student loan is running low, and licking its gummed edge.
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