Ok we'll put the love in on hold until we have at least three beautiful maidens to attend it, but i dont care if they arent journo minded of course...
just as long as we get as far away from that park scene as possible...
ok here it is. i thought it'd be cool to post it because though i am interested in journalism and the like i have never really bothered before to have a crack, so im still pretty ravenous for advice and praise (ok and constructive critism, fine  ) !!! might be cool to put it on a largely US forum too cos i was wondering if it was a bit thin on facts, let me know if you get the picture!
Friends! Smokers! Our time is short. The Passives of our Kind have finally won. They have had Blair in their pocket all along. Almost enough to fairly equate them with that firm student favourite, George W, you might even contend…
But joking aside (I‘ll give you a moment to sew up your sides) in all seriousness and unhappy sincerity, who are we to begrudge them their victory? It is after all, a victory over their hitherto commonplace lot of unasked-for and long-suffered carcinogenic exposure. Not that those words mean anything to a hardy smoker, but still. On the 1st of July this year, the winds of change will sweep with merciless freshness through our beloved and often smoky student union. It will sweep on through smoky student unions across the length and breadth of the nation, implacable in its charge to rid the land of the haze and hum of secondary smoke, stopping only at the Scottish border, across which they have already bitten the pot-pourri. By wind vigorous, fragrant and clean, we smokers are to be purged in all our winding plumes of acrid grey glory. We are a dying breed indeed. As a beloved disciple of the great white lung snake, this implacable fact is unlikely to have escaped your attention, even if only it has been hovering, like a pestilential crow, about the edges of your consciousness. Or perhaps you are a vocal non-smoker, aware and vilified at last. Either way you may rest assured that change is coming.
For the smoker the time has come for fight or flight. Better to prepare for any storm, I don’t need to make any New Orleans jokes to persuade you of that. But are we to fight our addiction or fight the new national legislation? Do we fly from our seats to light up, as imminently we must, or do we fly in finality from sweet nicotine’s bewitching clutches?
We know what the government would have us do. Like the lucky wards of any Great Nanny State worth it’s salt, we are to be treated in the coming months to a multimedia governmental blanketing in anti-smoking propaganda. Or perhaps less hysterically, anti-smoking… encouragement. It has already begun. All very much financed by the smoking pound of course, but that is by the by, the law has been passed and we the (smoking) people must meet it. Whether we do so on the street, fag in hand, or with the dubious aid of a nicotine patch (and willpower, always read the label) is the question very much at hand, six months and counting.
The ‘Hooked’ campaign certainly looks a winner. The inaugural television advert follows in anaemic grey motion a twenty-thirty-something who is yanked viciously off his feet by the great fish hook embedded in his cheek, who is dragged unceremoniously through the personage and place of an office building to the dubious reward of a shivering midwinter cigarette, alone, by the bins. Potent imagery, perhaps. But will it be enough? Lavatories, are becoming plastered with confidences in lurid betrayal of the highly poisonous Benzine, of the highly poisonous Arsenic, substances which, each poster proclaims in shock, are ‘available in the street in 2007’! In cigarettes. This branch of the campaign for the smoking hearts and minds too has a televised advert. But most smokers know the risks. So are we buying it? Or do we need another reason to stub it out once and for all?
It seemed such a long time away, when the legislation was pushed through back in X. But it was always going to creep up on the plaintive and unsuspecting smoker, and creep up it has. Sadly, for all our liberality and unionisation, the student smoker can be no exception. Travesty? Our citadels must fall! Our long held reserves of domain, places of culture, smoke and poise will be torn from our yellow-finger nailed grip! Bar One, The Interval, Coffee Revolution. Ours no longer. No more cigarettes and beer. No more cigarettes and brownies. But most cruelly of all, no more cigarettes and coffee. Very well, true, we will always have the perilous wind-trap between the Arts Tower and the Library, they can’t take that from us, but for all the coming deprivations of habit, I for one have been catalysed. Thrust bewildered by fortune into giving up. Or at least trying to.
Will you be joining me? We all know it is much easier said than done. You could perhaps take up coffee, or rigorous self-improvement at large. That will fill the time. The sense of fellowship, ever the more heightened since the introduction of wild and obsequious threats to each product’s packaging will soon fade into the illusion it has always been. Let us join the non-smoking masses in their patient world of conversation and eye contact! For you Golden Virginia aficionados, the reassuring process of construction will be lost too, for that I can only advise napkin origami. And as for the undoubted sense of cool that smoking lends (yes, for rollies you can times that by two), I can only advise spending the smoking money on some happening new threads, possibly from Oxfam.
I’ve started already. Quitting. It wasn’t a New Years resolution, they have proved too spurious, it started before that. Simply based on a powerful and compelling whim, timed just right, at the peak of a mull upon all my insidious pleasures. I shan’t try to compel you to do the same, the true moment of quitting really is an arbitrary beast and there isn’t a nicotine patch or revolting placebo of gum in the land that could convince me otherwise. The beer, the brownies, the coffee, surely it is only addiction that drives those to necessitate a partner? Of course, it is. And though it will continue to be hard, to sacrifice a further indulgence at these moments and indeed, all moments, who am I to fly in the face of sweeping social reform? If it is one that is going to drive me from an appallingly upholstered but comfortable and sociable Bar One seat into the dashing wind and rains outside then certainly I am no-one. Ok, so the summer wont be so bad but this is England for pity’s sake, they don’t last long. Far better then, the comfort of my behind and continuing abstinence. Surely my lungs will thank me too. On this occasion, for this tired bastion of oral fixation, sad or invigorating as it may be, the Nanny State may have won. Goodbye Bar One, goodbye The Interval after 4pm, Goodbye Coffee Revolution (sniff), your smoking friends shall miss you.
But one final word. If you are choosing to fight oppression (forgive me all you long suffering passive smokers, I mean only the oppression of vice, and a rather good one at that) instead of addiction then I wish you all the luck you deserve. You may have deciphered from the phraseology of the previous paragraph that I can’t claim to be entirely sincere in my tub thumping, what with the fact that I appear to have ‘started quitting’, which, lets be honest, is nothing if not a bit duplicitous. Not quite the definite article, I admit. So, I may well be joining you. For a bit. Occasionally. For a treat. But not forever, no. Certainly not. I’ll give up completely sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time. But then, smoking is a hard habit to kick, isn’t it? What’s that? Oh, really? Ok then, one more it is, in the rain, in the huddle. I’ll enjoy the solidarity.
--------------------
read books
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds 
Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale 
Bulk Substrate 
Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order
Psilocybeingzz 
Edit 
Reply 
) 
ummikko
1 2 all )
Delyrium
Turd
Captain Loafy McPoopdick
ZippoZ
exclusive58
KingOftheThing
Xionide