I go down the shop to buy a packet of cigs for a friend. I tell the cashier the brand.
What colour? she says. Blue, gold or red?
I dunno, I say. The one with Bryan on the packet.
Who’s Bryan?
The poster boy of lung cancer. On the rack of his deathbed. Skin sick as pus, emaciated, eyes wild, pleading.
Sounds terrible, she says.
It is. Cancer porn. Spookier than anything you’ll see on Halloween.
John Malone 
Love it! I mean “skin sick as pus”. That’s awful ( awfully good writing). But that’s cigarette packets. And it does make halloween seem a pretty weak. 🙂.
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thanks. I don’t know if packets overseas feature such graphic photos but smokers here must be terribly addicted to keep smoking with those reminders confronting them. And what about the morality of the tax on cigarettes? It’s mostly poorer people who smoke and the tax must be a heavy impost on them
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terrifying. here they don’t, but i think cigs in our neighbor, canada, do
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yes, I imagine Canada would; I have never been a smoker, thank god; 🙂
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I can’t say that I know, since they’re all locked in a cabinet here. It makes me wonder how one even starts.
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I used to smoke at parties when I was younger but never got hooked 🙂 it’s an expensive habit here
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I smoked a little bit when I was teenager, about one term, my friend and I shared a few packets of ‘Kim’ cigarettes. I think that was the name. Didn’t actually like it much, but it made us feel adult … as much as thirteen year olds can be adult.
A terrible habit, and sadly, one too many people are still victims of … the numbers are always heading downwards though.
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was good that you and I though we experimented never got hooked 🙂
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Yes, that’s true, John. I did have a smoker in the house though, for a while. Graham, who I went on yo marry, was a smoker when I met him. He gave it up after finding his (heavy smoker) father, dead in the kitchen, some time after we met.
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They really go to town on the images here in the UK. If I was minded to start I’d like to think they would make me think twice!
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must be similar to us here in Oz; makes you wonder why they don’t do it to show the results of high-speed car accidents; maybe that’s a step too far
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still people buy them and puff!
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sadly, sadly 😦
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