Fresher Fumes

It’s very easy to get into smoking at University. One minute you’re a fresh faced healthy hearted being and the next you’re a sallow skinned, coughing, subhuman creature.

I’ve always prided myself on being a non-smoker and the best smelling person I know as a result. I had a friend at sixth form who used to come to English lessons at 9AM bringing a stench with her that would suggest an ashtray had vomited all over her. In fact, I stated this once and I suppose you could say that we’re no longer friends.

At any rate, I digress.

The point is that smoking is smelly, likely to induce heart attacks and cancer and financially beyond the means of any normal student...yet somehow, like so many others, I have allowed myself to get addicted to cigarettes at university. ‘Why is this?’ I hear myself ask. Well, before the smoking ban kicked in, we smokers and non-smokers socialised together in utter harmony.

However, slowly but surely over the last couple of years, a very definite segregation has taken place and one day last year, I realised that I’d been left all on my lonesome in a pub. I searched high and low for my friends and eventually found them at a normal height, huddling outside in the cold and breathing in the sweet fumes of carbon monoxide. I certainly felt left out so I too lit up and became what many call a ‘social smoker’.

The only problem with that is that at the beginning of university, one is pretty much socialising all the time and smoking has the advantages of being both a conversation starter (‘Can I borrow a light?’) and a means of finding oneself in a situation where conversation is possible and uninterrupted by loud music. Imagine it: “hell-ella-o-ella-I’m-ella

-Tom-ay-what course-ay-are -under- you-my-on?-umbrella”. This is the common situation in any union bar.

So, you can see how the enticing trap that the social benefits of smoking might draw an undiscerning student like me into. Not only do I smoke cigarettes...but now I’ve started on cigars, which are far more decadent I think but no less unhealthy.

Last week, I felt all uppity and on-edge all day long and the reason why only occurred to me whilst I was browsing the spirits in Essentials and a green and white coloured box caught my eye. The realisation spread like mould over me - I needed a fag. My situation is now dire and I’ve got a spot on my nose. What would I say to others? It’s probably best not to smoke at university, but it might help you make friends - but then again, so might joining a society and that probably won’t give you a look of permanent grubbiness and a putrid smell.