KEY POINTS:
It's good not to know what's round the corner. When I was young, I was just as arrogant and profligate as teenagers are today.
I never imagined I would be old - surely death would be better than being 40.
I would look at my parents and teachers and older people in the workforce and marvel that they had the courage to get out of bed and face the world with their grey hair and wrinkles and daggy clothes.
How anyone wearing a pink and grey puffball dress, blue mascara and sporting a poodle perm could sneer at the fashion sense of others is ludicrous with the benefit of hindsight, but that's the thing about being young.
You don't look back, you don't look forward, you live gloriously and splendidly and wantonly in the present. Which is the only way to be young.
If you try to protect yourself against getting older, if you try to preserve what you have, you're only cheating yourself. Excess and disregard for sensible advice is a rite of passage, and the best life lessons are experiential. Sometimes they're hard lessons to learn. Smoking for instance. I was never a big smoker. I started when I began working as a journalist for the NZBC, and that was only because the newsroom was full of smokers.
I stank at the end of the day, and thought if you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em, but my heart wasn't really in it.
I went though a phase of smoking Sobranies - coloured cocktail cigarettes - while drinking Moet when Brideshead Revisited first screened, but that was only for effect. As were the stonking great Cuban cigars I'd smoke at the Piano Bar at the James Cook.
I only smoked at nights when I was drinking, and when I gave up drinking, I gave up smoking. And even though I'm back having the odd tipple now, I'll never go back to smoking. Just writing about it makes me feel nauseous. But I know that there are those who love their fags, who know all about the health risks and keep puffing anyway.
Mark Peck popped up at Parliament's finance select committee hearing this week on behalf of the Smokefree Coalition, advocating that the Government price cigarettes off the market.
Whop a huge great tax on to fags, said mean old Mark, and people will give up smoking. I don't think it's that easy. Drugs are expensive, and people who can least afford them will still buy them. Make them too expensive and people will grow their own tobacco - apparently, according to one of my talkback callers, you can buy homegrown baccy down at your local if you know the right person to talk to. Port or rum flavoured. Who knew? I need to get out of the suburbs more.
Michael Cullen said a ruinous tax would hurt those from the lower socio-economic groupings the hardest, and it would be unfair on them, and therefore it would be unlikely to happen. A caller reminded me that in Orwell's 1984, the Proles were kept in check with cheap Victory liquor, cheap Victory fags, widespread porn and a national lottery that never seemed to pay out. While the fags are anomalous, the rest sounds familiar.
However much a packet of ciggies costs , people will choose to go to hell in their own way. As the great philosophers believe, it is the freedom to choose and to experiment that puts humans ahead of the rest of nature. And besides, most smokers grow out of smoking. Those that don't, learn their lesson the hard way.
Sure, we all have to die of something, but it's living a half life that we never consider. The "live fast die young" ethos among some of the young has a nice air of bravado about it, but living fast and living long as a tetraplegic, with someone employed to wipe your bum, doesn't have quite the same romance.
And I bet all those poor souls slowly suffocating in their lung fluid from emphysema would never have wrapped their lips around a ciggy if they'd known what lay in wait for them, and maybe that's a good thing.
So smoke away, people. Ignore the thin-lipped wowsers who would deprive you of the joy of assuaging a nicotine addiction, and puff to your hearts' content.
Just be prepared that inevitably there will be a price to pay, and with the benefit of hindsight and age, the price may be too high.
