|
I've just given up smoking (again!) - hopefully for the final time. But my record is patchy: I started smoking at age nine, gave up at thirteen, started again at sixteen, gave up when I was 51, started again at 54, gave up for nearly six months last year (aged 58/59), and have so far been free of cigarettes since the beginning of February, and so succeeded in being a non-smoker at the age of 60. Now that I'm officially retired, I don't have "the stresses of work" as an excuse!
It got me to wondering, though.
Nearly all the teenagers I know smoke. Many, perhaps most, give it up in their late teens or early 20s - often on leaving school, or leaving University/College. But the stories dealing with teens, both here and elsewhere, very rarely feature smokers, of any age, though there are plentiful descriptions of the early-morning coffee, and wonderful cups of tea! I'm not sure why this should be ... perhaps the authors (having reached the age of discretion/giving up) don't want to portray smoking for fear of glamourising it? Perhaps the teens the authors know don't actually smoke? Perhaps nearly everyone who writes these kinds of stories is a lifelong non-smoker? I'd be interested in what others - whether writers or not - think.
Off-hand, I can only think of one story sequence where the main characters smoked regularly (the wonderful Foley-Mashburn Saga, by Brew Maxwell), out of the several hundred I've read over the years.
And what about electronic "cigarettes", or "vaping" as it seems to be becoming known? Do kids go for these? I've just started, as part of my giving-up process, but most of the users I see around the place are late 20s to early 40s.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
|