So, I’m fifteen. I have bad teeth and I smoke. Every half an hour or so I can guarantee the small release of bliss that the cigarette delivers. That it achieves this by delivering a small release of agony that only another cigarette can alleviate is neither here nor there to me. I credit the cigarette with healing powers and am proud to be a smoker. It sits well with the unorthodox, maverick rebelliousness I fool myself is my style. It’s cooler, more radical and soulfully alienated than a Cadbury’s Curly-Wurly and a foam shrimp. Photographs of Jean Paul Sartre reveal that he has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, not a sherbet fountain. It is revealing that amongst my favourite sweets were candy cigarettes, chocolate cigarettes, cigars and pipes and that strange shredded coconut wrapped in a wax paper and presented as a simulacrum of rolling tobacco.
Almost twenty years pass with me in this state. I am not an alcoholic. I like a drink from time to time, but I have never veered even close to alcoholism, I don’t know why, it is just the case. I can’t abide cannabis. Makes me feel nauseous. Maybe it’s just that sugar has taught me to dislike downers: dope and drink are depressants, cigarettes and sugar are stimulants. So I smoke like Sheffield in the 1850s. I drink a great deal of coffee. I still like sweets. I am starting to become much more addicted to food in general. From having been one who just scoffed the fuel he needed without thinking, I have started to become a gourmand, if not a gourmet. My metabolism changes and I start to put on weight.
Hello, Charlie On the documentary I made about manic depression I spoke to many about their experiences with alcohol and drugs; I spoke too about my own use of cocaine. What a strange thing to do, I think, to suck powder up into your nose. A bit like tapping yourself lightly on the head with a parsnip, only sillier.
But … there’s a difference. Unlike parsnips and unlike tobacco, this substance alters mood and energy levels. It’s the new sugar. There’s a rush.
I didn’t like to ingest cocaine when working, either writing or performing. Work provides its own buzz, its own reward, deeper and more satisfying than any drug I’ve ever met. But my down time, my play time was often fuelled by the sherbet of shame, ‘the devil’s dandruff’ as Robin Williams called it.
To cut a long, meandering and tedious story short, I stopped all that some four years ago. Took the decision one night. ‘No more coke,’ I said to myself and never touched the stuff again. I never had the slightest withdrawal pang, nothing like the agonies of giving up smoking. Now there’s a brute …
Wrestling the leaf I tried to give up smoking on my thirtieth birthday. That lasted less than a week and, dispirited, I didn’t try again until last year. I had kicked coke, surely I could knock nicotine on the head with just as much insouciance and ease?
A very nice man from the Allen Carr Institute gave me a free session. I was out in the street firing up the old Marlboro Mediums ten minutes later, actually rather resentful of the ‘technique’, which I’m sure is splendid but certainly didn’t suit me.
Then, as I started filming the first series of Kingdom up in Norfolk I bought a shed-load of nicotine replacement itemries – the cigarette holder type, the mints and lozenges, the patches and the foul gum. Bless my blimey, but that technique truly seemed to work! It was agony and I slipped up a few times, but it really did seem to sever the tie. I finished three months of filming a real live non-smoker. I had even stopped chewing and sucking the nicotine therapy gunk too. Then I had cause to go to America. Now, you may think America is a pretty good place not to smoke and generally you’d be right, but I had flown to Los Angeles specifically to do something I hadn’t done in any major way during my new life as a non-smoker. I had gone there to write. It was a screenplay and I needed to be in LA for the meetings that accompanied this particular script.
I was so delighted to hear about your documentary on the whole US. Most do not even bother with my state(Alaska). Or even think its a part of the US. I wonder what you will be doing in Alaska? Well, I hope you make a quick visit to my University at least if you fly into Anchorage, Or are you driving through from the lower 48? I’m really hope to see you black cab around town. I fear you will have a problem driving it all through Alaska, as there are certain areas where you need to fly in. But I very much doubt you will have time to discover all of what Alaska has to offer, seeing as it is such a large landmass. I think I will be then only one in Alaska who knows who you are.(That was a little egotistical of me ,but probably true.) So I really hope to run into you sometime.Although, I’m afraid that I will sound like a stuttering idiot.You must forgive me if that happens.
Loved this article so much I decided to join in.
Damn you! for mentioning sugar coated coconut tobacco, which comes in wax paper and makes your mouth water at the mere thought.Is it still available or will I have to go online and order a whole batch?Fry you are incorrigible and I hate you!
Seriously,good luck, your article is so readable and gives such an insight to those who crave anything,yes including sweets! Now where the hell is my last tunnocks snowball?
bi polar…
bi polar and manic depression…
There is a theory open to criticism which no absolute doubt, it will meet soon, that alcoholics don’t like sweet things.
Therefore, maybe one takes a choice at some stage as to which addiction to espouse.
For one must have an addiction and sweets, or cigarettes, are going to cause less trouble to everyone else, than one’s alcohol fix.
It’s not often that someone who has eaten several bars of Fruit and Nut or smoked several cigarettes, is going to stagger through the door with his underpants on his head and bread sticks in his ears…..
Sweets are not a bad addiction for onlookers to suffer through.
Stephen,
Believe I can relate to your previous addiction to sweets. I am chocoholic on a grand scale. I can’t go a minute without thinking about chocolates. Sometimes I would spend my last penny on a choclate bar or cake. I admire your determination and sucess of kicking the sweets and cigarettes, and especially coke habit. I have always admired your work and love all of the comedy shows you have done with Hugh (Laurie). As far as I am concerned you two are the best comedy duo ever.
Keep up the good work.
Jacqueline
P.S. My mom loved from the moment she saw on Jeeves and Wooster. You remind her of her old boyfriend.
Belated thanks for that Bi-Polar documentary: it aired 2 weeks after my own diagnosis of the same. I’d known it for years, of course, but it takes longer for those with prescription pads to spot it. Now on Duloxetine with a dash of trifluoperazine to stop me going too high….
Aahhh… ciggies…. yes. I got stuck on the nicotene gum for longer than I had actually smoked. Still struggling to kick the choccie biccie habit though… never connected that with mood… must seriously abandon them and see what difference it makes.
Hope the arm is recovering well.
:^)
[...] also be trying to start a legitimate blog, and post “blessays” (to use Stephen Fry’s term) regularly. As I transition back into Academia (caps for [...]
Welcome to the states, though you’re probably gone by now. I really hope you had a decent time while here in Wisconsin, though that may have been impossible if you were here in the winter (schools were closed because it was too cold, roughly -35!).
I can’t wait for this documentary to come out. I highly doubt I will ever get the chance to travel the country like you have, but your films have always had a real feel to them so watching this one will be a great substitute.
Stephen, I saw your frigin’ cab in Philadelphia! but have only just relized it was yours. My girlfriend and I, both Australians who now live in the US, were walking along (south street i think?) and we were like whoa! left hand drive London style cab! Who would have the balls to drive that here?! I imagine the steering wheel staying on the left would complicate matters even more when driving on the opposite side of the road. If I had only known it was you! I certainly would have taken a photo and sent it in. My girlfriend (your biggest fan) is absolutely kicking herself now, as to am I.
We cannot wait for the next session of QI, and all your other awesome-ness…
Cheers,
Leigh
[...] also be trying to start a legitimate blog, and post “blessays” (to use Stephen Fry’s term) regularly. As I transition back into Academia (caps for [...]
OMG! This was such an insight into something that plagued me for years…. the smoke-coffee-chatty-living-working thing.
I was FORCED to quite having a pair of lungs that were on a big protest, and had decided to shut off the little air sacs so that I felt like I was suffercating from within!
So you might say I was lucky (in a way that is) that good old mother nature sent me this evil effect early in the piece to force my hand…
But with the writing thing; now that was a very different story!
A few years ago, I sat down at a computer, and began to write.
OMGosh…..WHERE did this come from?! I had never written a word ~ well other than hello, goodbye, and how’s things type of writing (ie. letter writing) so this came as a total shock!
I’d get up in the morning, and go straight to the computer; with a cup of tea, pens, and a box of tissues (for some reason typing makes me cloggy in the snoot) and off I’d go….
At around 4pm one afternoon, I stepped back from myself, and realised that I had been typing since 7am that morning!
Still dressed in PJs, and not a tap of any other thing done that day… This went on for weeks! And after I’d finished my story, I found then I had a peculiar habit of editing my own work; self correcting till I felt I would surely have to tear out my hair…
Over and over and over ……….. 3 or 4 years on, with the manuscripts shoved cruely into a drawer that was too small….
I had left it on the shelf ~ for another time, another place.
But the desire to write came back to haunt me, and I found myself GLUED to the computer once more….
And then, the MOMENT came when (drum roll) THE COMPUTER WENT DOWN…..
AHA! I know….(I thought) I will take a pen and a reem of A4 crisp white paper, and WRITE IT OUT BY HAND….
CLANG!!!!!!
That was when I made my discovery…. without the computer I was mute…. numb….. totally unable to write a SINGLE WORD!
OMGosh! What was that about?! But to this day, unless I am on the computer, I cannot for the life of me, write!
So your addiction ~ the must-have-cigg-to-write is MY must-have-computer-to-write syndrome!
hahaha! I’m laughing because it’s so WEIRD but it’s true, never the less!
An excellent blog; one filled to the brim with a snapshot peek into the facinating world of creative art…
Thank you so much for sharing too… I’ve known ~ or should I say, been very fond of quite a few selebs…. but there is not always the option to get to KNOW those people, to be able to write upon their blog (if indeed they keep a blog) nor does there seem to be many that open their hearts to the general public, and encourage interexchange of ideas thoughts abberations and more besides!
Above all, thank you for your incredible ability to bring about a great camaraderie, via the internet pages! ((-_-))
p.s.
re: “The land you see on the horizon there is actually Canada, where she twists round the topmost corner of Maine at Passamaquoddy Bay”
WOW….. BEAUTIFUL photo…
You could almost imagine what it was like to be there…..
I felt I was THERE …….
What is the defininition of serenity?
Your photo!
I find eating those little individual applesauce containers while writing to be a tremendous help
Can’t give up the sugar, coca cola is my drug of choice. I’m putting my dentists kids through college.
You are quite brilliant, Stephen.
You also have the most remarkable understanding of your own psychology, something that I admire very much in people. Going a bit off topic, I think it’s something more people should take time to get to grips with; it may help the human race in many ways.
Also; sugar addiction, I sympathise with you there. I have had an eating disorder for many years- not, primarily, in the sense that I want to be thin (though that was a part of it too) and it’s funny because the things I did live on were the sweet things. They were very much an addiction, and as much as I wanted to stop eating all together, I couldn’t resist this indulgence.
Anyway, I shall shush now!
Dear Stephen…….You have to be the one person I can honestly say is the most articulate,grammatically awesome etc etc person I know(not personally of course)
I joined Twitter hoping to receive a Tweet from your good self.Alas not as yet but I understand the pressure you must be under.I love poetry and find this is ,the majority of the time,how I can express my feelings.You say in your book,” The ode less travelled ” that your poetry is personal and the road you yourself decided not to venture down.I feel the same about mine too,however,for you to glane at one of my poems would be a cataclysmic honour . I appreciate you get so many people begging you for the same.Me….It’s not for recognition,I dont want my thoughts published or anything,just for the person I admire the most to give me an opinion.My site is http://zoe-tis-me.weebly.com/the poem in question is “Praying for time”To me it would be like T.S.Elliot reading it…….Here’s hoping?? Love your new cab by the way….such a cute little smile in the twitter pic!!
Much love
Zoe