Need a Vanilla Patch?

'Americans," G.K. Chesterton once said, "are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices." He did not mean that as a compliment, but he was exactly right -- puritanism has always been a strong streak running through American life. Canada, however, has always made the United States look libertine in comparison and one can only cringe at the thought of what comments the situation here might have elicited from Chesterton.

A century later, Canadians still have cause to cringe over the official attitude to the use of alcohol and tobacco. Right-thinking young Winnipeggers, joined by others from Thunder Bay and Ottawa, on Thursday protested the sale of flavoured cigarettes in the belief that if nicotine is not enough to hook you, the flavour of vanilla might and must be stopped.

read more in "Puritism Marches On" in the Winnipeg Free Press

Smoking and Writing

Some friends are mentioned in an article by A.N. Wilson (biographer of Belloc and Lewis):

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.

The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot.

continue reading at the Telegraph...

If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is another mention of smoking friends later in the article:

Sitting with my drink in such now-empty bars, my mind has turned to the great smokers of the past - to C S Lewis, who smoked 60 cigarettes a day between pipes with his friends Charles Williams (cigarette smoker) and Tolkien (pipe-smoker); to Thomas Carlyle, whose wife made him smoke in the kitchen of their house in Cheyne Row, but who is unimaginable without tobacco, to Robert Browning, who quickly adapted to the new cigarette craze, to the great John Cowper Powys, who continued to smoke cigarettes, and to produce fascinating novels, into his nineties.