By Cosmo Adair
I sleep better when I’ve had something to drink. Apparently, that’s impossible—at least, my brother likes to say so. Everytime I come downstairs on a Saturday morning, having had a few drinks before and after supper, and I say, ‘God, I slept well last night,’ he squints a little before telling me, ‘That’s impossible, scientifically.’ Those five forbidding, unbalanced syllables, with their maliciously rushed ‘ti-fic’ and the slick arrogance of the concluding ‘ly’, exist for the sole purpose of disproving the intimations of my own body. I hate them.
I’m sure that scientifically, it’s true; I reckon that technically, it might even be correct. No doubt that fictional character, adored by Pollsters and Populists alike, the ‘Man on the Street’ (Who is he? Tell me!) has been rigorously monitored and tested and that was what the results said. So I’m not going to sit here, tapping away, arguing against the scientifically correct. Instead, I want to question how on earth we’ve allowed ourselves to return to some barbarically puritanical mindset in which our own personal experience of what makes us happy, what makes us tick (given that, of course, it’s in moderation: don’t do crack, etc.) means precious little.
Until recently, the only salvation was that no matter how much said pursuers of the SCIENTIFICALLY-proven might judge your habits, they couldn’t do much about them. But then, last week, the UK’s expiring PM Rishi Sunak announced an imminent ban on smoking for those born after 2009 in what strikes me as a cynical ploy to secure a legacy beyond the immoral expulsion of immigrants to Rwanda. As David Hockney rightly said: ‘There are too many bossy people in England … Bossy people are humourless. This is just madness to me. Why can’t Mr Sunak leave the smokers alone.’ Sunak (tee-totalist and faster) doesn’t propose to take cigarettes off everyone, only those born after 2009: imagine in 2050, then, the farce in which a forty-two year-old can smoke and a forty-one year-old can’t. It shows the hour hand is moving yet closer to midnight: that midnight being, once again, scientifically proven to occur in Derby in 2050 when the UK’s last cigarette will be smoked, according to a 2019 report.
Obviously, smoking kills. But, as Hockney writes, ‘The National Health Service will always have to deal with birth and deaths. They are part of life: the cause of death is birth. On the cigarette packet it says “SMOKING KILLS” … well, what do I reply? “LIFE IS A KILLER.” I’m one day nearer oblivion today than I was yesterday. This applies to everybody on the planet.’ As ever, Britain’s preeminent artist (who should live in Britain, but moved to France due to our intrusive smoking laws) is onto something.
As thick and naive as I was when I smoked my first cigarette, I never doubted that it was pernicious. In fact, I reckon that’s why I did it: when you’re young, danger seems sexy and mature, if almost heroic. If smoking is, really, considered ‘cool’ then I think that’s why: because it kills you. Most cool things tend to. (Guns, Flamethrowers, Sports Cars, Alcohol, etc.) But the assumption of Rishi Sunak is that he can tell people how bad smoking is, at which point they will immediately stop and then thank him for this unprecedented enlightenment. In positioning himself against it, I daresay Rishi Sunak has made smoking more cool and more appealing to a lot of people.
In any discussion of smoking, or of the debates between happiness and longevity, it seems right to recourse to Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow, in which he writes: ‘He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by that god called Time? It won’t be that convulsive, heart-busting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.’ Yes, smoking ends what non-smoking extends. But we must never let ourselves look at human lives as if they are statistics. In this Bureaucracy of Happiness, in which illegality and social pressure take away each slightly individualised form of pleasure, I feel we are all becoming like Auden’s “Unknown Citizen,” of whom the poet asks:
“Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”
In arguments of this kind, I always remember a Times interview with France’s leading cancer specialist, David Khayat, who spoke in opposition to what he perceived to be the tyrannical intrusion of an Anglo-Saxon puritanism (diets, teetotalism, avoidance of red meat) on French customs: he spoke of how “The risk we face is of a life without pleasure, a life without enjoyment … And if you force that upon people, they will explode.” He goes on to say that with an immaculately healthy lifestyle, ‘you will be able to avoid old age, illness and death. But that’s wrong. We are all going to grow old, we are all going to fall ill and we are all going to die.’ Thus, we should aim for balanced lives: never the excess of an addict, nor the zeal of an ascetic. And, with Khayat’s backing, I suppose I’m correct here (scientifically).
So, I implore you to stave off the social condescension, the bossiness, and the arrogance which you might adopt in the face of those who seek a healthy balance in their life which includes a bit of pleasure and happiness as opposed to posting a double ton of miserable and waning years. And if not drinking, not smoking, not eating red meats and fatty foods, makes you happy, so be it: your happiness delights me. I do not mean to criticise or infringe upon your happiness. I merely want to shout, alongside Hockney: ‘END BOSSINESS NOW.’