110 Esquire — June 2018
at our monthly lunch, the editor of our
noble and upstanding organ looked at me wea-
rily across the table — wearily, and a litle cra-
venly. “So,” he said, “how did it go?”
I looked back at him, and, trying not
to sound too sprightly, replied: “Pretty good
— by which I mean, I’ll be a fortnight clean
come hursday.”
He shook his head sadly, and there was an
almost imperceptible wobble in his cheeks —
the first faint stirrings, one suspects, of the
jowls-to-come.
“Funny,” he said, “a few years ago, all my
writers were asking to be sent abseiling
down the north face of the Eiger, or on a drive
across the Sahara, or hunting polar bears in
Spitsbergen. Now, the only thing any of you
want is to be confined somewhere soft and
safe, while being deprived of whatever vice it
is that alicts you. How the mighy are fallen!”
I could’ve made those incipient jowls
twitch a bit more, by observing that we hadn’t
exactly fallen — simply aged, along with you,
dear readers. And moreover, I knew why Alex
was looking so down in the mouth: he sufers
from exactly the same vice as me, a chronic and
deeply ingrained addiction to nicotine in all its
myriad and ramiying forms. Regular readers
of this magazine have probably absorbed a fair
amount of my writing about my nicotine habit
over the years; for some, this may have been
a gateway to my writing about all my other bad
habits, and for that I apologise. I’m only too
aware of how injurious to health such writing
can be, and moreover that it’s far from being
a victimless crime — there’s such a thing as sec-
ondary reading...
But bear with me, please, for ater 44 years
of puffing, chewing, sucking and snorting, it
really is over for me. Why, if La Divina Nicotina
were to appear before me right now, arrayed in
her silkiest and most intoxicatingly revealing
apparel — the smoy tresses of her own sen-
sual combustion — I would simply wave her
away with these air-freshening words: “I do
not know you.”
he Italian writer Italo Svevo, encouraged
by no less a smoker than James Joyce, pub-
lished a novel in 1923 called Zeno’s Conscience.
Its eponymous antihero is a furious nicotine
addict, one who never manages to kick the
habit. Zeno’s rationale is nothing of the sort:
“Who knows,” he contends, “whether, if I had
given up smoking, I should really have become
the strong, perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it
was this very doubt that bound me to my vice,
because life is so much pleasanter if one is able
to believe in one’s own latent greatness.”
As we parted ater lunch, Alex wished me
well in my continuing abstinence — but I knew
he didn’t really mean it: he wanted my great-
ness to remain as latent as his own! Yes, it
doesn’t mater if it’s heroin, booze or fags, hard-
core addicts hate it when one of their number
gets clean. Whereas the rest of the world saw
a strong and perfect man striding along Brewer
Street, Alex saw a rat, swimming away from
his smoy, sinking ship.
But how, I hear you, gentle reader, coo...
How, Will, did you exit the motorway of excess
and coast to a gentle halt in the escape lane
of, if not wisdom, at any rate moderate san-
ity? (I mean to say, who the ruddy fuck goes
on smoking into his sixth decade? I once asked
John McVicar, the legendary hard man and at
one time “Britain’s Most Wanted Man” if he’d
ever smoked, because it seemed somehow inev-
itable that a character like him, who belonged
to that Sixties black-and-white-film-and-grey-
and-blue-smoke London, the one featuring the
Krays and Christine Keeler — of whom more
later — would’ve done so. And he fixed me with
a gimlet eye, and exhaled, “’Course I did — but
as soon as I read Richard Doll’s report connect-
ing it to cancer I gave it up... That would’ve
been around 1960.”) he answer is, hurting, raw,stressed and, habit-shackled reader, lashed to
the monstrously mechanical go-round of your
own addictions: luxury! Yes, unashamed, five-
star, no-holds-barred, plumped-up and dusted
down, impeccably served and grandiosely set
luxury — the proverbial silver spoon, resting
on a velvet cushion floating in a pool of warm
custard, or possibly vichyssoise.
hing is: I’ve done time (all right, granted
only a few hours, but the Old Bill did take away
my belt and shoelaces), and I’ve done rehab, but
neither of these absolute prohibitions availed
me any more than the repeated atempts I’ve
made to curb this or that addiction, atempts
which have invariably ended with the substi-
tution of one pernicious habit for another. (See
Esquire passim for a haunting description of
how my vaping got so out of control that I’d
regularly awaken with the witch’s tit of the
vaporiser clenched between my avid jaws.)
And when I say I’ve “done rehab’’, I mean
tough rehab, not some touchy-feely desertNow a five-star country hotel, Berkshire’s Grade I-listed Cliveden House boasts a colourful 350-year-history of playing
host to royaly, prominent politicians and the Sixties Profumo scandal