Smoking

It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that my six-year-old is awake but I’m choosing to ignore her. How repellent, I hear you murmur. And it is repellent, in many ways. I am a smoker and a mother, hardly the Madonna and child. How can these two realities ever be reconciled? They jam against each other all day long, uncomfortably.  Smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise it’s just disgusting It’s OK, I tell myself, every single day. I never smoke in front of them. Instead, I smoke when they’re in bed, when the

On Monday night, still shaken from the weekend’s news, I went to a small dinner in the basement of a charming restaurant in Chancery Lane, with fellow supporters of the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The brave MSF doctors and nurses are rather like fire-watchers in their turrets, scanning the world for where they are needed next before diving into danger at a moment’s notice. No war zone is too perilous. They have been entrenched in Gaza for years and are used to functioning under the most difficult conditions. This week, they had to work out of tented operating theatres, erected between bombed-out ruins, because ambulances cannot be

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces of coercive conformity. As far as I see it, the path to the grave is lined with compromise after compromise until, at the moment of the final rattle, one has become a travesty, physically and spiritually, of the person one used to be. Not that I would want to overdramatise the whole thing, mind. I more usually tend to present my dis-avowal of smoking as a kind of glorious epiphany. One moment I smoked, the next I didn’t. And in a sense that is true: no doctors were involved, there

When the COP26 climate change conference hits Glasgow at the end of October, the media will be out in force to discover how world leaders are going to meet their ambitious carbon emission targets. It will be on the front pages. Edited highlights will be on television. Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon will be elbowing each other out of the way to get in the limelight. Extinction Rebellion will be performing their doomsday japes outside. But when COP9 begins in November, few will notice. Admittedly, this event is being held online this year, but it would have flown under the radar even if it had been held in the Hague,

The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in blocks of 200 at a time — and they have also delivered them to my house during this lockdown. This is useful for several reasons. Most importantly it aids my self-isolation programme. But it also minimises the risk of me being caught in the shop by a lurking Matt Hancock or perhaps a chief constable of the police, anxious to punish people who may be purchasing goods which they do not consider ‘essential’. If anything is essential during this time of compulsory boredom, it is cigarettes and alcohol. I have

Q. My mother died a few months ago. Her collection of colourful clothes, hats, shoes and an immense amount of costume jewellery was donated to various charity shops in nearby Devizes. Consequently, I now see a diverse range of ladies wearing one of my mother’s ‘little numbers’. If I bump into a friend festooned in these purchases, what is the right compliment to make? — N.C., Stanton St Bernard, Wilts A. Say nothing. Part of the joy of vintage clothing is the mystery of its provenance. The buyer can fantasise — surely it must have cost a fortune originally! It’s so chic it might even have belonged to Catherine Deneuve? Or