Booze is as evil as fags. But not as evil as indulgent mothers and their brats
Everyone's got their own Something Nasty In The Woodshed, and mine is Madonna's muff. Not in the flesh, you understand – rather, hand-held in black-and-white, glimpsed a whopping EIGHTEEN YEARS ago when some commissioning clown thought it would be a right laugh to give sensitive, sheltered me her book SEX to review. Visions of that greasy muff, which one could easily have fried an egg on without the benefit of oil, haunt me till this very day. However in recent years I've started to come round to the old bird. She hangs out in Israel, and now she's allegedly been seen with booze in one hand and a fag in the other as she celebrated her 52nd birthday.
BOOZE AND FAGS! The twins pillars of hedonism, demonised as heartless killers in the press, Booze and Fags are like a pair of fugitives who need each other but don't really like each other. I envision them on the run from the PC Police, each blaming the other for their pariah status.
"It's all your fault for giving people cancer!" yells Booze, fair chucking it back as they run. "You fat ignorant brute," replies Fags, stopping to light up. "If you hadn't got all those kids chugging down alcopops and beating each other up in the town centre of a Saturday night, we'd be laughing. Oh no, but YOU had to go and create an 8.5 per cent-proof low-calorie lager, didn't you?"
"You lowered the nation's sperm count and made my nan's breath stink!" retorts Booze. And on they go... together yet apart.
As a non-smoker who loves to drink and whose friends all smoke, I can see both sides of the story. There's no doubt that Fags gets the worst rap when it comes to shunning. I've just received an e-mail telling me that One Aldwych hotel, for a decade my home-from-home in London – a place where over 10 years I've probably spent enough money to literally buy a house – will get rid of its small number of designated smoking rooms from 1 September.
Meanwhile, down in the Lobby Bar where I've spent so many happy hours, people will continue to pay handsomely to ruin their health, as they will be doing in pubs and clubs all across the country. These drinkers may or may not go on to wreak havoc in cars, or they may take it into their heads to beat up or murder some innocent bystander – yet we still see adverts in which alcohol is portrayed as some magic potion, one sip of which will bid us enter some sexy, sparkly wonderland of fun and games. No one shows you photos of ruined livers on bottles of booze – yet no one ever went and mowed down a pedestrian or urinated on a war memorial because they'd smoked a whole packet of Benson & Hedges in one go.
drive from www.independent.co.uk