Mountaineer’s Lungs

I’m always surprised by how silly some people can look when they are smoking.  After all, when you’re doing something as cool as smoking, it should be difficult to look silly.  But lots of people manage it - my friend and fellow mountaineer Bruce for example.  For Bruce smoking involves holding a cigarette awkwardly between the tips of two fingers of a flattened hand.  He allows it to hover just north of his mouth and takes the occasional pouty lunge towards its filter from beneath with his eyes shut.  If you took the cigarette away he would look like a blind man blowing rather camp kisses to a balcony above.

I have mocked Bruce’s manner of smoking frequently but it is not fair of me.  If my friend Daniella’s opinion is anything to go by, my own smoking technique doesn’t really pass muster either.  ‘Nick-nocks,’ she would roar, being the introducer of that particular nickname, ‘you look so funny.  No one smokes like you do.  Let me do an impression.’  And she would reach across the table, pluck the cigarette from my mouth and inhale it gustily, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs with a sharp sound like a vacuum cleaner hose coming free from a sofa cushion.  She would then purse her lips into an exaggerated moue and blast the smoke over our heads like the sloping stroke of an exclamation mark, dot it with a small ring and relax her mouth into a bow of pure pleasure.  It looked quite sexy when she did it but apparently, on me, not so much.  It just looked silly.  She would pass the cigarette, my cigarette, up along the wing and the various impersonations of me would continue, always with the sucking noises, always with the obvious enjoyment and always always with the lips.

I’m sure that there are plenty of politicians that would tell you the same thing but it’s not much fun seeing people do impressions of you.  Especially if you suspect that they are right.  This may be why no one has Knighted Rory Bremner or Jon Culshaw and Alistair McGowan doesn’t often get invited round to Richard and Judy’s house.  This was 2001 and public smoking was still legal in the UK, although San Luis Obispo had been smoke-free for eleven years by then.  Nowadays if you wanted to do an impression of me smoking, you’d have to usher everyone outside and huddle in a doorway which would probably kill the joke somewhat.  Then it was much easier and it happened all too frequently, particularly around Daniella.  I began to fear that this was how I would become known.  My career as a novelist was still a little way from starting but would (inevitably I felt) take off and make me something of a public figure.  When this happened, what if the funny smoking became the thing they focused on?  Bremner and Culshaw and McGowan would compete with younger impressionists to do the louder inhale or the make most frightening mouth.  I would be approached to endorse cigarette brands, by their rivals.  My waxwork at Madame Tussauds would be holding a cigarette and, when I went to its unveiling, I would hear a small motor start up and realise that they had wired the mouth up to a smoke machine which blew a steady plume over the heads of PG Wodehouse, Salman Rushdie and the Spice Girls.

I started smoking because I didn’t drink coffee.  It sounds ludicrous but let me explain.  At boarding school you often feel you need an excuse to visit people’s rooms.  You can’t just show up with no apparent agenda as that is what earns you a reputation as a ‘loomer’.  Looming is a serious social crime when you are essentially squatting in someone’s room, taking up space that they might need for other things and contributing little to the social niceties.  I think it’s a bit similar to being a ‘lurker’ on Twitter but tweeters are less vocal in their objection to this than boarders are to loomers.  It’s easy not to be a loomer though.  All you need to do is suggest a reason for the visit.  ‘How about a coffee?’ you might say, or just ‘fancy a tab?’ that northern word for cigarette that got me into so much trouble when I started using it down south.  The trouble is that you have to actually deliver on one of these things.  You can’t come in and just watch other people do it as that’s a bit weird.  It was a choice between coffee and smoking and as I think coffee is disgusting, a highly addictive, foul smelling and extremely expensive habit which gives you terrible breath and appalling nerves, it had to be smoking.  That’s why I started smoking.

Okay, you’re not convinced are you?  Well you’re right.  The truth is, I started smoking because I wanted to be cool.  As we all know, smoking is cool.  Think of the Marlboro man.  Think of those dudey guys in leather jackets in Grease, the ones who fill their Zippos with petrol and are too cool to sing much.  Think of James Dean.  If smoking isn’t cool, then it’s time travel back to the fifties. 

But smoking is cool.  We all knew it, despite what our parents were telling us, despite what our teachers, our doctors, dentists and hygienists not to mention those increasingly terrifying health warnings all said.  Even our swotty cousins and Superman himself said it.  But we knew they were wrong.  It had to be cool.  What was the point otherwise?

I continued on the assumption that smoking was cool for seventeen years.  I learned all the things you can learn to add to your cool when you smoke - things like being able to open a Zippo lighter a dozen different ways with a single snap of the fingers or to light it by clicking your fingers on the wheel.  I learned to blow smoke rings and to let smoke seep out of my mouth while inhaling through my nose – the French Inhale or the Irish Waterfall.  I could roll and light a perfect cigarette blindfolded or a very messy one with just one hand.  My friend Kirb and I spent a week perfecting the cross lateral mouth/nostril combination move from Lethal Weapon until we were better than Mel Gibson himself.  If you have any idea what I’m talking about, you’re as sad as we were.  Gradually I built up every possible weapon in my arsenal of cool; an arsenal that began with smoking.  I evolved my technique until the world around me was left in no doubt of how much I was enjoying my smoking, how much I was enjoying being cool. 

But despite all that, chinks began to appear.  I started to doubt.  Did smoking really make me all that cool?  More and more people were banishing me to balconies and doorsteps.  It was costing me a fortune and an evening would come to an abrupt halt when I ran out of smokes.  The occasional bout of bronchitis was a bit annoying and there seemed to be less and less evidence that it was actually cool.  There was even a guy who drank in the Castle, Johnny, who dressed like a fifties rocker in black leather and jeans with a quiff that would have been the envy of Elvis.  Johnny was cool and he smoked.  But, as we got to know Johnny, we realised that he wasn’t really all that cool.  He was a bit boring and perhaps trying a bit hard.  Not only that but despite my smooth-handed Zippo tricks and smoke rings, my smoking was no longer drawing admiring glances and was actually causing people to openly mock me and do impressions.  Perhaps the cool of smoking was all a myth, I decided.  Perhaps it will never be proved to be cool.  Perhaps I’d better give up.

So up I gave.  I would never convince those around me that smoking was cool and when I finally stubbed one out for the final time at midnight on the eve of my thirtieth birthday it was with the defeated air of someone who has lost the same argument too many times.  For eighteen months I turned my nose up at all smokable items, filter cigarettes, roll-ups, hookah pipes, anything at all that I knew would give me that delicious feeling of drawing down smoke into my lungs.  If I ever got involved in heroin, I told myself with twisted logic, I would have to inject it as I knew that chasing the dragon would make me lose the fight and in no time I’d be a smoker again.  ‘I’m winning,’ I said to myself and I was.  I only dreamed about smoking every week or so.  I no longer spent entire afternoons outside on cold days, trying to blow rings with my breath.  I owned at least three biros that hadn’t been chewed to death and I had pretty much stopped going into McDonalds to steal straws to suck.  I had managed to quit. 

Bruce was still claiming that he wasn’t a smoker and still lighting up every Friday night.  He once bet me that for every cigarette he smoked after 2006, he would donate £10 to the Westminster Lourdes fundraising efforts.  If I hold him to it, this year’s trip will be free for several hundred people and Bruce will be bankrupt.  However, he’s been very supportive of my efforts to give up so I may let it lie.  It was Bruce who suggested that becoming mountaineers might be a good way to celebrate giving up smoking, so together we signed up to climb Kilimanjaro and began training in earnest.

One of the things that training for Kilimanjaro taught me, aside from how to pay unnaturally close attention to the colour and consistency of my pee (‘It must always be clear and copious’), concerned smoking.  Bruce and I learned this by the fireside of a guest house at the foot of the Pen Y Gwryd track up Mount Snowdon.  Bruce and I were not the only mountaineers to whom the guest house had been home.  They told us that our colleague Sir Edmund Hillary and his gang had spent a decent amount of time staying there while training for their Everest attempt.  I had to commend them.  We had, after all, had the same idea. 

 

After a long day’s climbing and a delicious dinner we sank into a couple of chairs around the fire, letting out the kind of manly sighs as we did so, that only mountaineer’s lungs can make.  Much like Sir Edmund, we sat with our feet up and told mountaineering tales.  Bruce and I were comparatively near the beginning of our climbing careers and so had rather fewer tales to tell than those around us.  For the main part, we were content to listen as our hosts regaled us with tales of Hillary and the gang.  Bruce got overexcited and began to smoke, bobbing up and down like a thirsty sparrow on the filter.  The sight of Bruce smoking is always a tricky one for a newcomer and I was afraid that our hosts might look askance on this, particularly as we were discussing such supreme feats of fitness.

But to my surprise, they viewed his smoking warmly.  It made him one of the boys.  ‘All the best mountaineers are smokers’, they told us, explaining that as long as they didn’t actually lug their Marlboro Lights up the mountain with them it actually helped a climber to be a smoker.  ‘Think about it’, they answered our amazed expressions, ‘who better than a smoker to be used to training and exerting themselves with limited lung capacity.  Who better than a smoker to be able to handle that terribly thin oxygen-starved air at the summit?  Who better?’  It made so much sense. 

If all the best mountaineers are smokers then surely smoking must make you a better mountaineer.  You don’t get much cooler than a chiselled, rugged mountaineer.  A man who can make an assault on a lofty peak and brave the elements to conquer it.  A man who can take on a mountain.  A very cool man indeed.  A smoker.

Finally, this was the evidence for which I had been searching - the proof that makes smoking genuinely cool.  Smoking makes you a better mountaineer.  Do you hear that kids?  Nick-O-Teen was right.  Superman was wrong.  We should have listened.  Smoking is cool.  Smoking has purpose.  Smoking is good.  Smoking helps you climb impossible mountains and may even get you knighted, like Sir Edmund Hillary.  It was as if the Marlboro Man had been reincarnated and was dancing a triumphant jig.

But it was too late for me.  Eighteen months too late.  My smoking days were over.  I had gone through too much to quit ever to want to do it again.  Just as smoking became cool, I became a non-smoker. 

Bruce took another drag of his cigarette, nibbling at the tip like a nervous goldfish trying to French kiss another nervous goldfish.  I knew what he was saying.  ‘You had your chance, ex-smoker.  You could have been cool and you blew it.  I’m the real smoker now.  I’m the real mountaineer.  Me and Sir Edmund.’  I slunk away, foiled.  To those who stood around it might have seemed like I was gnashing my teeth in impotent rage.  I was actually chewing gum, my nineteenth Wrigley’s Extra, having managed to get myself down to two packs a day.  But inside I was gnashing.  And I still am.  Limited lung capacity?  Harrumph.

I wonder if limited lung capacity is an extra benefit of my recently acquired bike accessory.  After a couple of irritating bouts of tonsillitis over Christmas, I decided that my tonsils had now qualified themselves as excess baggage’ and as part of my California-inspired drive for leanness, suggested that a doctor might like to whip them out as I no longer had much use for them.  He explained that although your tonsils are pretty near to your wisdom teeth, you can’t just saunter in to the surgery, have a quick injection and waggle your eyebrows in mute disapproval while strange hands yank them out, stitch you up and send you home in time for a delicious lunch of mashed banana.  It’s considerably more serious than that and perhaps I might to better not to be so profligate in getting them infected in the first place.  This seemed like a tall order to me.  After all, I’m not exactly rubbing my tonsils against loo seats or the hand rails on buses.  What else can I do?

‘Well it probably isn’t helped by the cycling’, he told me.  I am no longer cruising carelessly through San Luis Obispo, breathing in the sweet scents of orange blossom, cabernet grapes and the contented dispositions of thirty thousand sunny citizens.  Instead I barrel daily down Chiswick High Road, dodging smoke-belching dustcarts and dusty white vans.  Idling engines at traffic lights leak fumes into my nostrils and the harder I pump the pedals the more pollution I breathe.  Not a good state of affairs.  I ponder idly about using it as an excuse to head back to SLO but think that the Immigrations guys may not share my concerns about my tonsils, however much I open my mouth and go ‘aaah’ for them. 

Instead, I invest in a mask, a becoming black thing that velcros around my face and stops me breathing in the fumes.  I have been trying it out over the last week and am not sure about it.  The doctor told me that breathing in the London air I may as well be smoking several cigarettes a day and I think, ‘well at least that would make me cool’.  The facemask does not make me cool.  When I am wearing it, I look like a mugger or someone who thinks he is a ninja.  When I take it off, I look far worse.  Breathing inside it is a moist affair and you tend to dribble a bit.  Not much but enough to need to wipe if off when you take the mask off.  There is a metal thing that clamps over your nose and I may have got the setting on this wrong as it squeezes my nose tightly and again tends to make it dribble a bit.  Not much.  But enough.  I’m also not sure I’ve got the hang of actually breathing through the thing yet either.  I have to labour so much harder to suck the air in but that’s probably because it’s being so amazingly filtered and I’m now breathing pure oxygen or something.  So when I arrive somewhere on my bike and whip my mask off, I am dribbling and panting heavily and in serious need of a tissue.  It won’t be long before I am arrested or at least shepherded kindly back to a nearby mental institution.

I am half tempted to start smoking again.  If I develop mountaineer’s lungs (as the packaging should be promising you) I will be able to breathe quite happily in the London traffic with no ill effects whatsoever.  I will suck those fumes in with satisfaction and blow delicate rings with them on the way back out.  But I went through too much to quit and I’m not going back now, however rugged and desirable smoking has become.

I suppose I will have to console myself with the slogan of the wannabe ultra fashionable.  ‘I used to smoke,’ I will tell people, ‘before it was cool.’