Park Drive or Woodbines?

The Beatles with ciggies, 1963

performing 'Hal An Tow' in a veritable fog of tab smoke:

Lal and Mike Waterson both died of cancer...

of the deep earnestness of 60s folkies.

Teenage Kicks: The Search For Sophistication last night?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0126vdf

There were a lot of things on there I'm never going to miss (including the Vesta curry) but smoking has to be No.1.

edit: or should that be No.6?

is absolutely 100% definitely the thing that I miss the least about the old days.

when I think about it now. In my late teens I'd commute by underground from North London to Oxford Circus by tube, spending the entire journey puffing No 6's in the smoking carriage. Then when I got to work, at Harlequin Records, half of us staff used to smoke behind the counter while serving customers. No objections were ever raised, as far as I recall. How we must have stank !

to broach this a while ago, with mixed results

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/remember-when-smoking-was-cool

Sitting on the sofa is the very young and beautiful Anne Briggs.

Actually I think the move to ban smoking in public spaces is a good one, everywhere you walk there is someone in front leaving a cloud of foul smoke. Revolting!

...is bloody marvellous, and I say that as someone who still occasionally enjoys the odd gasper with a pint or two. Don't miss rolling in at 2 in the morning reeking of smoke at all.

I was watching "State Of Play" - the original series, not the film - recently, and was struck by the fact that, even though it's obviously 21st Century Britain, it was filmed before then ban. Everyone's smoking in the pub! It looks weird.

I've started training as a psychiatric nurse and I walk onto Ward 54 for my first clinical placement.

It's an afternoon shift and as I get onto the ward Sister is dispensing lunchtime medication, there are 3 or 4 waiting at the medicine trolley, all of them smoking, even Sister is smoking and has an ashtray actually on a shelf in the trolley.

Oh happy days!

The amount of smokers who work in the care industry is quite incredible.

as I five year old at primary school in the morning the teacher used to get us to write (or draw) our diaries, stick her feet up on the desk and spark up a Benny hedgehog. Different times!

Around March-April 1972. At least he had the consideration to smoke in the hand further from me.

That's the thing that's most striking about this clip - the fact that people are pretty much smoking while dandling children on their knees. And these are not thoughtless slatterns. Well, they're thoughtless. But not slatterns.

sitting in the cafeteria of BHS in Edinburgh as recently as 2004.

They had a No Smoking section, but it was worse than useless as the smoke simply drifted across from the assembled Neds and Rab C. Nesbitts on the other side of the rope divide, adding a nice dollop of essence of No.6 to your reasonably-priced breakfast.

My grandmother took up smoking when she was 28 on the advice of a doctor. She had just been widowed, and he told her that smoking would help when she was worried. Her husband had just died of lung disease.

has anyone ever met a more sanctimonious creature than an ex-smoker.

need I say more. My parents both smoked, infact I think my dad started my mother on her - albeit modest - habit. Apart from the giveaway gasper in the bathroom whilst growing up, never liked it though now enjoy the odd cigar and was thinking last night that I have reached the age when a pipe wouldn't look too ridiculous.

I live in Sarajevo, and everyone smokes. I don't know of any restaurants with a non-smoking section, let alone a non-smoking restaurant. There are two non-smoking cafes, in a city of 100s of cafes. Taxi drivers smoke, bus drivers smoke, the teller in the post office smokes. People smoke in the corridor outside my office, and some even smoke in their offices, despite rules to the contrary.

Cigarettes cost in the region of 80p-£1 a pack, and recently went down in price. When is the last time that happened in Britain?

... I went to Poland on a stag night. You could smoke indoors and everyone did. I came back stinking to high heaven with a voice not unlike Marge Simpson's. Up till then, I was against the smoking ban. I'm not sure I'd want it lifted now.

The only down side since the smoking ban in pubs is that you can now smell the horrendous stink of the toilets.

... disinfectant!

Howard Marks was appearing had to walk out after he started a long and glib hymn to smoking 9this is normal fags not bifters) glossing over over the all the harm it causes, his stoner fans lapped it up though.

Having been out to pub/venue etc. full of smokers, then coming home late and taking off my t-shirt to receive a glorious face full of tobacco aroma.

The Bisto family watched the original Jerry Lewis version from 1963. I'd forgotten (or more likely did not notice) how copious the smoking is by Buddy Love, the prof's hip alter ego. Watching him smoke this time around had an odd effect on me. I felt uncomfortable at the sight of it and, unsurprisingly, the eldest daughter wanted to know why he was smoking so much. It felt like it was intended to be invidious but I don't know whether by design on the part of Lewis or by an accident of hindsight, as a reflection of my own 21st Century sensibilities.

They were doing their first set of exams. You were allowed to take nothing into the exam room. All necessary materials would be provided. And so they were. Pens, pencils, geometrical equipment, navigational tables and the like. Plus an ashtray, a box of Swan Vestas and a pack of twenty RN issue tabs.

(These were known to all as Blue Lines because of the blue line down the side of each cigarette. They were rough as arseholes. I'm waiting for Jackthebiscuit to come over all nostalgic)

How well I recall Peter Cook's appearances. Whenever Cook was out of shot, or when Parky was talking to another guest, you knew he was still there from the cloud of cigarette smoke that drifted across the screen at all times.

I've never been an habitual smoker, and haven't smoked anything for about twenty years. I'm gasping for one now, though!

I read that line "oh how we smoked" before? It's been bugging me all day.

I didn't twig until I'd left home, in fact. I guess that dog walking, 'fixing the car', work and the pub provided enough opportunities without him actually smoking in the house. He later told me he'd been smoking since he was 6. I couldn't have been more astonished if he'd told me he was really Elvis. Throat cancer stopped him (in remission, thankfully).

love smoking, especially with coffee in the morning and wine or beer at night. Can't believe I gave up for a couple of years, I must have been mad. Really annoys me you can't smoke at gigs. Smokers should pay less for their tickets really as they have to spend a fair amount of time outside.

You could always try exchanging one form of insanity for another.

http://www.healedpeople.com/knowledge/addictions/1-smoking/2-the-lord-de...

...aspects of Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis - the autoimmune disease that I suffer from - is that it's almost exclusively a disease of non-smokers.

The profile is reversed in a similar condition called Primary Biliary Cirrhosis which seems to effect smokers more.

Nobody knows why - something to do with the way that the chemicals in cigarettes interact with the immune system.

Dave Swarbrick, fiddle playing wrapped in smoke as I remember him.
Lung transplant 2004

...according to the Daily Telegraph.

I can only think of Derek Smalls and Duck Dunn. Maybe it's a bass player's thing.

...has appeared on some single pic sleeves (and possibly LP sleeves, would have to check the back of 'Heavy Horses' etc) and in 70s/80s documentaries with a pipe. And I think Tull's keyboard player/orchestrator of the same period, David Palmer, also sported a pipe onstage. All of which fitted well with the tweedy country squire look. And which, in retrospect, made punk all the more likely to happen...

these days would have you down as a curio. I can't remember the last time I saw someone smoking a pipe, and I'm sure I've never seen anyone of my peers smoke one ever.

If anyone under 70 does smoke a pipe these days it's surely an affectation. No one has a Condor moment anymore.

the Australian government is about to introduce legislation forcing the tobacco companies to sell their wares in plain packaging, so that every brand of cigarettes will look virtually the same. The thinking behind this is to de-glamorise cigarettes, theoretically making them less appealing to young smokers.

Inevitably, the tobacco companies are screaming blue murder about this and are spending millions on TV ads condemning the plain packaging legislation and denouncing the Julia Gillard Labor (sic) government for creating a "Nanny State".

Every store that sells cigarettes has petitions on the counter and posters on the wall calling for the legislation to be scrapped.

I believe Australia is one of the first countries in the world to try and introduce this kind of legislation, so there are interesting times ahead.

I had the same idea a few years ago. With the added proviso that you could only buy cigarettes in bulk (say boxes of 200) from state-run shops.

I'm amused how the tobacco industry is peddling doublethink on this (it will affect their profits while simultaneously not working).

This is rather cool, isn't it?

On the other hand he died at the ripe old age of 53?

... words like 'chicken' and 'roost' inevitably come to mind, bless him.

They were sold with the slogans '13.5 million smokers will admit it's bad for them. Only one tobacco company will', 'Let Us Be The Nail In Your Coffin' and 'The Grim Reaper Don't Come Cheaper'.