Ashley Carter from the city centre looks at why smokers choose to keep on puffing away
BILL Hicks used to tell a joke about Yul Brynner and the anti-smoking adverts he made, which were released after his death from lung cancer.
He drew a comparison between the actor, who died aged 65, and running enthusiast Jim Fixx, who died only a few months before at the age of 52. His point was that the absence of activities like smoking and drinking from your life are no guarantee of longevity.
Recent statistics on addiction have shown that smoking 20 cigarettes a day cuts a decade off your life, whereas drinking more than two alcoholic beverages a day will shave 23 years off the life expectancy of an alcoholic.
While I would never recommend an increase in either activity to anyone I knew, I would hesitate to suggest they stop, either.
The dangers of smoking and alcohol consumption have been common knowledge for long enough. As with most things in life that are fun, you have to decide yourself how much you enjoy it compared to the damage it could do.
I don't want to live forever; the thought of that terrifies me more than dying.
I have been a smoker, although have recently made the change to the awful, mouth-drying electronic cigarettes. Although the decision was partly motivated by health concerns, I don't fear getting cancer, or any other disease that comes with smoking.
To a child, adulthood feels like some intangible fantasy. You sense that at some point you will suddenly evolve into the same form of human your parents embody.
But the older you get, the more acutely aware you become that you remain exactly who you always are; the years just pass by at ever-increasing speed. The lines in your face increase, but the same two eyes stare back at you every single day.
It is this fact that makes decisions like drinking and smoking increasingly more important. There comes a point when you are forced to choose just what it is you are going to regret when you are older. The thought of not living my life as I want to terrifies me a lot more than any downsides that smoking or alcohol can bring.
So although both smoking and drinking will have an adverse effect on your health, the fact remains that both activities are enormous fun. If it came down to a straight trade-off between smoking for the rest of my life, and an extra decade at the end of it, I'd probably roll the dice.
