Confession: Sometimes I Look In My Pockets for a Lighter

I'm not sure Sir Nick is saying he couldn't give two shits at my confession or whether he's suprised that I was ever a smoker at all. I'm asthmatic, you see - always have been. What crazy darkness within me thought it was a great idea to pick up the tar sticks? Really? I fell for that too cool for school thing? Yeah, kinda did. Crouched down in the toilet block, taking frantic puffs and looking under the door for 'teacher shoes' so we could piff them, smoking under the portables, coming home and rubbing my hands with the rosemary bush to disguise it from parents who years later said they knew full well I was dabbling with the devil.

How could I resist the lure of tobacco? Below is Townes Van Zandt, a gorgeous cowboy and lyrical genius offering me a dart or a joint or both. I mean, when a cute boy pulls out his pack of Winnie Blues (yep, it was Australia in the 1980's) you aren't going to say, nah, I don't smoke. You're going to nonchalently take one off him, swallow your coughing and pretend like you've done it since you were born. And then you'll get down to sucking smoky face

Won't you lend your lungs to me?
Mine are collapsing
Plant my feet and bitterly
Breathe up the time that's passing.
Breath I'll take and breath I'll give
Pray the day's not poison
Stand among the ones that live
In lonely indecision.
Townes Van Zandt: Lungs

And then there's Jimmy, blasting out of my walkman whilst I'm waiting to paddle out for my heat in a surfing contest, and I've just finished a fag yet I've got the lungs of a young girl and it doesn't make much difference, and I win my first trophy and my last. It's washed out with Lucozade and chased with salt water. Here's me, healthy vego yoga surfer girl, sucking smoke into my lungs to dampen the anxiety of having to perform.

It would take me years to realise this, but it was more than definitely my nervous energy that made me a smoker. Smoke dampened the intensity of my emotional spirit, which I couldn't rein in and didn't know how.

There's Bobby D as well, that clever Nobel lit prize winner that totally divided people into two camps - those that thought he's a lyrical genius and those that couldn't separate his voice from his words. How could not light one up as I listened to Visions of Johanna where the 'ghosts of electricity howl in the bones of her face' - I was feeling all that nostalgia and regret and the only way to quash that one down was with smoke:

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

Growing up with Dylan, I can't help but think of the Stones. I'm still slightly in love with the young Mick from the cover of my Dad's vinyl. I think of Marianne Faithful's husky voice ruined from drugs and think of how romantic I thought that whole era.

When I'm watchin' my tv and a man comes on and tell me
How white my shirts can be
But, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me

And how can I neglect Patti? Leaving a chef boyfriend far too old for me, who smoked Benson and Hedges 16's, where I'd take out my earring and poke a hole in the filter so I could smoke it without totally annihilating my lungs. I strutted out of there and went straight into the arms of another lover who drowned all his angst in bongs and Sisters of Mercy.

Don't look for me
I'll get ahead
Remember darling
Don't smoke in bed

Being stoned and listening to 'Horses':

Then he cries, then he screams, saying
Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud
Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud

Then there was grunge. All denim jackets and docs and little black dresses, and a pack of tobacco stuffed down my bra. There was Kurt Cobain in Melbourne and hitch hiking home to the coast to arrive very early in the morning to crush tobacco in a bowl to mix with green and muse about how shit he was, after all, but still playing 'Bleach' on the cassette deck anyway and musing about his brilliance despite his fucked up-ness, and him dead shortly after that.

There was was Tom Waits too, who forever reminds me of travelling west in a '76 Ford Falcon, which my girlfriend eventually crashed into a tree because she dropped a fag in her lap. I remember she told her folks she was changing a tape.

and she collected bones of all kinds
and she lived in a trailer under a bridge
and she made her own whiskey and gave cigarettes to kids
and she'd been struck by lightning seven or eight times
and she hated the mention of rain

When I left Australia, it was a whole new smoking world - Lucky Strikes in the Czech Republic and eventually Champion Rubys in the UK, which were a firm favourite. Those days were paraphernalia days, having tins for your tobacco or leather pouches with room for pills and Rizlers. The tunes got more techno and reggae and cigarettes calmed the wirey feeling of a night out with substances that eventually we'd kick because it wasn't a world we could stay in.

I'd light one roll up off the other in the hazier moments. What else could I do with all that nervous energy? I needed something to do with my mouth, my tongue, my lips, my fingers. The smoke would calm me, like an old friend stroking my back when I was at my most anxious moments.

Eventually, it had to stop. I got really bad pneumonia and ended up in hospital in Bath for a week, and that was in the early days of my relationship with Jamie. Poor guy had to look after a kid he barely knew and come and visit a woman he'd lived with and known for only months. He was terrified of losing me and I couldn't breath at all - the peak flow meter that measures your breath read 10 and it was meant to read 400 - that's how bad it was. Feels like a life time ago. How could I have ignored those warnings for so long?

I did though, for a few more years of trying to quit. Everyone finds their own path, and I don't want to give any advice. Eventually it took both of us travelling for Asia for a few months (we hated smoking in the heat) and landing in Australia where we had to stay with my folks in a non-smoking house, and with no friends here to speak of that smoked, the habit just died. We'd kept saying over and over and over that we were non smokers, imprinting new neural pathways without knowing that's what we were doing. I had lapses, over the years, of course - nights out, hedonistic days where it seems more than reasonable to take everything you can and fuck the consequences.

Now, breath is everything to me. As a meditator and a yogi, dampening my life force with smoke is inconceivable.

But still, sometimes I find myself searching in my pockets for a lighter.