I HAD a couple of tokes on a cigarette last weekend. A lady at the back has fainted. Fear not, madam, for I lived to tell the following tale.

It was the first time a fag had disturbed my lips and lungs for nearly two decades. The situation was peculiar. Out of four of us present, sitting outside beside the sea and across from the mountains on a beautiful starlit night, complete with shooting star, two were smoking.

It’s so rare to see such a thing nowadays, when as far as I know hardly anyone smokes. One of the people present was foreign, right enough, which probably explains it. Worse still, he was Belgian, and I recall now that the Belgian-Dutch axis was always famed for smoking, particularly roll-ups and pipes, which are classy and have an air of the artisanal about them.

Indeed, it was because both my companions were smoking roll-ups that I couldn’t resist having a toke. Used to be a rolly-man myself. And, boy, did that toke do something to me. Like the narrator in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past) with his madeleine biscuit-cake, it sent me tumbling back in memory so richly that I experienced all the feelings of bygone days.

The smell of the tobacco, the feel of the paper, the heady inhalation of the poisonous vapours – simultaneously earthy and ethereal – returned me to my youth, when I was a tad less miserable and a lot more free. I recalled my own battered and scratched green Golden Virginia tin. I revisited the ritual of rolling, the nearest I’ve ever come to successful DIY.

It was like a dream. At this juncture, I should explain that, while vast quantities of vino had been consumed, the baccy was not waccy. But, in terms of effects on the mind, I recalled my justification for smoking at the time to be that it encouraged deep breathing and the calming effect that went with it. It was the Wim Hof Method without the cold showers.

Preposterous, of course, and I think back to smoking as a shameful breach of my usual resistance to social and cultural pressures. All the same, it came with other excuses: to have a break; to encourage concentration or at least dreaming for creative projects (writers and artists were particularly well known for the habit); to stare into the middle-distance, where life is always better.

So, suicidal or no, smoking afforded pleasures. Alas, we were not put on this Earth to enjoy life but to thole it. So, as the philosopher Basil Fawlty put it, another of life’s little pleasures was closed off, on undeniably sound health grounds.

The artist David Hockney thought he was put on Los Angeles to enjoy life there but alas, for the dedicated 82-year-old smoker, this possibility has declined of late, not least because of restrictions on smoking. So he’s decided to relocate to France, which is another foreign country with a strong tradition of le tabagisme.

“The French know how to live,” says Hockney. “They know about pleasure.” Sounds dreadful.

I thought the whole purpose of the European Union was to stifle pleasure, so I’m surprised it hasn’t banned smoking. Perhaps it’s outwith its purlieu (let’s face it, no one in Britain knows anything about the EU).

Ultimately, the whole purpose of law and government is to save us from ourselves. But it can be tricky factoring freedom into such endeavours. Ah, freedom: I remember it well. Fag in hand. Whole life before me. Smoking enhanced it, even as it curtailed it.

Alien intervention

WOULDN’T it be funny if aliens arrived and were smoking tabs? “Cancer, yeah: we cured all that crap.” We’d probably think they were talking out of their tentacles, which one suspects would lack the dexterity to make a roll-up.

Still, like most people, I believe humanity’s only hope lies in aliens coming to save us. Alas, understandably, they’re too feart to get oot their spaceships and come doon. Even if they did, they’d have to hope they met a bloke rather than a lady-woman, or whatever they’re called nowadays.

I know that sounds counter-intuitive because, out of the two genders, man is the most idiotic, not to mention violent. However, a new study by Oxford University researchers found that women were less likely to respond to messages from ooter space.

While men would say, “Aye, what d’ye want?”, women, fearing the worst, would keep schtum and pretend nothing was happening. And you thought they were all gab, gab, gab.

Scientists think that, if aliens do make contact, it’ll be by radio signal which is unfortunate since, despite or because of FM and digital, radio reception was better 30 years ago than it is today. I know. I was back there last weekend.

Stamp on it

I DON’T know why astronomers harp on about aliens contacting us by radio signal when it seems perfectly obvious they’ll text us on their iPhones – if they can afford them.

The latest model was unveiled this week, with the price varying between £729 and £1,049, if you want one that works. What a ridiculous sum.

I assumed the current demographic was the swanky executive but, as the latest model is aimed at the “selfie generation”, I take it that means young persons who participate in social media and similar evils.

I’ve never taken a selfie. The thought, come to think of it, has never even occurred to me. And I have a proper camera for photies. Indeed, I do hardly anything on my phone. It syncs to the internet and emails about 40 per cent of the time, with neither rhyme nor reason, and whenever I download an app, I get a message saying I need more “data”, even though I hardly use the ruddy thing.

If, understandably, the aliens identify me as leader of the planet Earth and want to make contact, I suggest they do so by letter, enclosing a stamp-addressed envelope if they want a reply.