Tuesday 29 May 2018

Say no to nicotine

May 31st is Say No to Nicotine Day. I gave up smoking twelve or more years ago and I was a chain smoker. I remember one very busy job in export when I had four phones, four ashtrays next to them and a cigarette burning in each. Once in a while the Managing Director would show up and say "you know you're not allowed to smoke here, don't you?' To which I always replied 'Oh, yes, I do know.' And I carried on puffing.
Do I miss smoking? Well, no not really. There is really only one cigarette that you absolutely enjoy if you are completely honest and that is the first one in the morning before your mouth - and breath - start to taste like the bottom of a parrot cage. Everything else you don't taste, you just need to get enough nicotine and stuff into your system.
Whenever something upset me, I reached for a cigarette as some kind of antidote. Did it help? No, never did. Why did I think puffing on a cigarette might help in a crisis? Hard to say, really. Certainly logic didn't have anything to do with it.
Am I glad I stopped smoking? You bet.
Was it hard to give up? Not really. Of course I stopped smoking when I first got married and in both my pregnancies. I tried stopping a good few times after that but without success. Then one day I bought a copy of Alan Carr's book which was in a sale. I consigned it to the back of my bookcase and meant to have a look at it in the distant future. But it sort of haunted me, knowing it was there. Everyone of my acquaintance who had stopped smoking attributed it to this book. It was kind of scary. Do I want to read it and stop smoking or do I want to continue smoking and read it when I'm around 80 years old or possibly later? In the end curiosity won out and I started reading it. Half way through I knew I was going to be able to stop.
I still remember when I had my last cigarette. Not your midnight, tomorrow is a new day stuff. I had three cigarettes left one Saturday morning. I finished my breakfast and smoked my usual cigarette. Went shopping, did a bit of housework, had the second last one. Then I sat out in the Spring sunshine on my balcony, made myself a cup of tea and took out the last cigarette and smoked it.  .
My family didn't notice I had stopped. I wasn't cranky. Yes, I felt something was missing for a few days. At work it was strange not to go downstairs with the smokers and hover at the side of the building (I worked in a no smoking building as you will have gathered). But I got accustomed to it all much faster than I had imagined.
I am so glad I stopped smoking!

Wednesday 23 May 2018

The Royal Wedding and Showing and Telling

Were you one of the millions around the world who watched the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? I know I did and I thoroughly enjoyed the romance of it. It all went off very well, as people are forever saying about weddings.
Ever since King Richard III cried 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse' in Shakespeare's play everyone has been associating the Royals with horses. The Queen and the Queen Mother all owned racehorses and attended Royal Ascot, arriving in a horse-drawn coach. Prince Harry and Meghan were driven in the Royal coach with the Windsor greys pulling it. Did you see that one grey horse of the escort behaving badly? He really gave his rider a hard time the whole journey to and from Windsor Castle. It is those little things on the fringe of events which interest me because they make it all so much more human.

Writers very often use these little snippets to illustrate a point. Anton Chekhov famously wrote "don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass". His advice has been passed on countless times to aspiring writers in order to demonstrate "show don't tell".  A smile, a frown, can all convey so much more than a whole paragraph of writing. Everyone with lip-reading talents craned to see what Prince Harry might have said to Meghan or she to him during the ceremony. I would have preferred to see the faces of some of the other Royals, or at least more of them, as the ceremony progressed. In general, though, when the cameras were trained on the invitees, it all appeared to be the same as a normal gathering of this sort.  People chatting easily with people they knew, somewhat stilted looking small talk among other groups (I'm going by body language here!) and one or two guests in the background not speaking to anybody. This is meat and drink to the writer. Watching people in conversation whether in the shops, on the bus or in a restaurant is an excellent way to learn how we all interact. Even a debate on television can be very illuminating and provide loads of ideas for writing conflict into situations in your novel or short story. Like all writers, you just have to be aware of the world around you.