Consider a credible ruse to escape from an embarrassing situation. In T S Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady, the dramatised narrator escapes a lady’s overtures under the pretext of a tobacco trance. In human interrelationship a pause that the lighting of a cigarette permits, often saves you from the pressure of a direct answer in a culture of subtle indirection. This is no defence for smoking but a sidelight on its lighter side.
In Portugal, one cannot help observing in the campus and places where youngsters gather for a rendezvous that more and more young people are taking to smoking. Especially girl students. Fortunately, the air in this part of the world is still fresh and able to absorb the excessive cigarette smoke coming from pubs and restaurants. You may need the shocked reaction of a tourist, say from a place like Australia, to realize the sensitivity to cigarette smoke elsewhere.
Of late, however, a visually prominent warning “Fumar Mata” has appeared on vending machines and cigarette packs that obliterate the pictorial attraction of buying a packet. Despite such steps, the habit is on the rise amongst teenagers. It is a common sight for a young student to fish out a mobile phone, read the screen, make a call, and then flip open a pack of cigarettes to penetrate the encompassing boredom or the emptiness of a yawning wait.
A young man when asked about the tobacco habit said that it began for him as naturally as shaving – to look older – and grew on as an aid to impress girls with.
Once upon a time, there was a certain romance attached to the idea of smoking. Eliot’s narrator brings the following associated ideas with the so-called tobacco trance: taking the air; admiring the monuments; discussing the late events; correcting one’s watch by the public clock; and then sitting for half an hour and drinking ‘our’ bocks. This was way back in 1917, the date when Eliot’s poems were first published. Such poetic images percolated the Hollywood films of the sixties and their parallel counterparts from Bombay. Images of cigarette smoke got linked to scenes of crime, romance and night clubs.
Once a man’s exclusive preserve, smoking was bound to be adopted by the opposite sex as more women entered the work culture. Today there is a reported demographic shift among the smoking population. The number of smoking women in Portugal is now around 15%, (compared to 10% in the year 2002) while male figures have dropped to about 40%.
{{/usCountry}}Once a man’s exclusive preserve, smoking was bound to be adopted by the opposite sex as more women entered the work culture. Today there is a reported demographic shift among the smoking population. The number of smoking women in Portugal is now around 15%, (compared to 10% in the year 2002) while male figures have dropped to about 40%.
{{/usCountry}}And finally for the lonely and the forlorn it is a good stratagem to ask for a light to open a relationship rather than the more brash “What is your mobile number?”