I loved smoking

I loved smoking.

I took one puff of a stolen cigarette in a toilet when I was about seven or eight. It was a good venue. I felt so sick! But I could sit down and recover for a while. And put the damn thing out in the toilet bowl. It would not flush  though, but with some ingenuity and a good wadding of loo paper, and a prod with the toilet brush, it disappeared at last into the swirling depths. I felt really, really guilty. My family were anti smoking, anti alcohol, anti sex, anti jazz, anti slang, anti fun, anti just-about-everything.

They were also anti Elvis Presley, anti James Dean, anti cinemas, anti parties, anti makeup, anti high healed shoes, anti, anti, anti. So by the time I was a teenager, I was well screwed up. I ended up in Boarding School - a "good" convent that might help me behave. In all those years, I never tried smoking again.

But every young person is freed eventually from adult persecution. I grew up.

I was sitting on a bed for my second cigarette. It was a good venue. I could lie back and recover. Recovery took a while. My second cigarette was a Toasted Lexington. Aaaaargh!

I can't remember any specific third cigarette, but it wasn't long before I smoked one or two cigarettes a day. As a student there was booze and sex (though I was sufficiently repressed not to indulge too much) and there were parties, music, laughing, dancing and FUN. The fun aspect of life was quite new and delightful. Life contained pleasure!

I only started proper smoking when life became seriously responsible for the first time - marriage (to the wrong man) and children. In between the stress, I smoked. It was lovely! It was calming, comforting and gave me deep pleasure. It made me happy in the turbulence.

Through all the ups and downs of life, in illness and in health, in emotional and physical pain, in happiness and celebration, smoking was my friend. I loved smoking.

I decided only death would us part.

In the face of anti smoking persecution I became more determined NEVER to stop. And in MY life I could not see the "horrors" of smoking manifesting themselves. No one seemed to be affected by second hand smoke. No one seemed to die from smoking. Well, not anyone I knew closely. I suppose I have been very lucky.

However, smoking is not a good thing. I believe it makes people ill. It's just that I have no personal experience of that in my 50 years of smoking. I am the lucky one. I have just had a huge physical "road worthiness" done by the doctor(s) and I am, as I suspected, very healthy. I am pleased that I am going into my seventies unscathed by my fifty years of smoking pleasure.

I believe, as some of you know, that smoking nowadays is more dangerous than it has ever been. The anti smoking industry has built up a huge image in our group consciousness that smoking is more evil than just about anything anyone can do. The picture of illness, suffering and death is so burned into our minds that smoking will harm us before we take the first puff, just by the self fulfilling thoughts we have about it.  Old fashioned  "safe" smoking of unadulterated natural tobacco, free from pre- conditioned thoughts, will never return. Smoking will become more and more deadly as the world picture of it is painted.                           

In August 2014, I will have been vaping for three years. What happened to "death do us part"? 

Well, I found I preferred vaping to smoking. I find it is just as pleasurable, just as comforting and just as delighting as smoking ever was.

I am a lucky person to have found vaping when I loved smoking so much.