The middle week in April is when I celebrate giving up smoking.
At least I do if I remember. I confess I haven't marked every anniversary with a self-congratulatory pat on the back, but I will next year when the 25th anniversary rolls around. Might even throw a party.
Funnily enough, I still have most of the reminders of my smoking days. The cough, for instance. Also an old brass lighter, a pair of wooden cigarette holders I bought in Turkey (long story: wouldn't care to see it in print) and, finally, a once-shiny cigarette case.
This last item I bought in an antiques shop in my student days, back when I thought dressing like an extra from Brideshead Revisited was perfectly reasonable. I know better now, obvs.
Until recently, most of this little collection seemed like something from another age, old-fashioned items more at home in David Niven's pockets or Graham Greene's novels or Grandad's attic than in the modern world of status updates and pop-up restaurants.
But what's interesting, looking back, is that I didn't start using the cigarette case until I had stopped smoking Gauloises. In other words, even a classy item like that couldn't out-cool the appeal of the French soft-pack. So if, as seems likely, the plans by the Scottish and UK governments to ban cigarette packaging are enacted and if, as also seems likely, we go down the Australian route and force the packets to be not only branding-free but come printed with pictures of blackened teeth and diseased gums, it seems to me that any smoker worth their pack of 20 is going to do what I did and reach for an accessory from an earlier time - the cigarette case.
Of course the corollary to all this is that if smokers are driven to readopt the cigarette case because the new packaging is so hideous, they will be conferring on smoking exactly the sort of glamour legislators are trying to remove from it. And where would that process end? What other smoking accessorises would be wheeled out? Smoking jackets, perhaps? "As old-fashioned as a smoking room," says Hardy Amies in his wonderful 1964 book ABC Of Men's Fashion. "Yet the idea is charming and very sensible." Yikes.
Likewise, as tobacconists have disappeared from the high street, charmless shops selling e-cigarettes have arrived in their place and in greater numbers. Some of these outlets call themselves Head Shops, though confusingly they don't seem to sell heads. At least not yet.
What accessories will the e-cigarette bring? They already come with carrying cases, but how about silver-plated USB sticks to charge them with? It's only a matter of time before the fashion labels get in on the act.
So as the 25th anniversary of my giving up the fags rolls round, I'm starting to wonder if my little cabinet of curiosities will look quite so quaint - and unthreatening - as it used to.
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