Smoking Bordello

I blame Gogol Bordello and the intravenous speed machine known as La Phaze (political punk with boots on; they’ll leave your ears ringing). Soaking me in sweat and other people’s vapours and then spitting me out into the cold Hammersmith night last Saturday.

Or maybe it was running round Battersea Park in cheap red fabric soaked through to the skin, with one hand holding up my Santa trousers and the other breathing nose-drippings through the beard.

Whatever the cause, I’ve spent the past few days running the kind of fever that I last picked up somewhere between Lusaka and Harare. In the midst of my delirium I also managed to inhale some sort of sharp-clawed creature that has been raking the inside of my chest ever since in a desperate effort to get out.

A lifetime’s love-hate relationship with the Indians’ Revenge hasn’t helped with the latter. But we’re not seeing each other at the moment, and however painful the scars might be from our past liaisons, it’s nothing compared to what it would be like if we were still together.

I love the scented vapours too much to say for certain that we won’t ever see each other again. But I also love my lungs enough to give them far more consideration now than I ever used to in my youth when it seemed like they would go on breathing forever. I’ll be taking them out on a trail of pre-Christmas festivities over the next week or so, and despite all my libertarian tendencies the first winter with a smoking ban is going to feel both welcome and right.