The meaning of smoking

My kitchen window, on the first floor (level 2) of our flats, looks down on a road leading to the station. That’s where most passers-by are going to or coming from, often with cases on wheels that provide the first sound I hear on many mornings. Today itt’s cold out there and a man who just passed wheeling his case and looking underdressed was plainly feeling it. But he still had a cigarette on, which entailed keeping his hands, or, strictly, one of them, ungloved.

It obviously meant something to him to be smoking as he walked and shivered and I thought back to my own smoking days, when I too would have wanted to light up while walking in the cold. Or while working outside at gardening or building something. Part of the story is obviously addiction, though addiction is in some usage just a label for liking to smoke. But another part is the extension of our personal zone and the bubble of culture out into the alien environment. Instead of taking in nature in the form of its air we take in as our own smoke, the work of our lungs and their prosthesis, the cigarette. The cigarette, part of which, after all, is inside us, isn’t an external device but a bit of us. Like our own mouths, we can’t see it; it’s an intake channel equivalent to and as intimate as the nose.

Smoking is a defiant declaration of independence: ‘Wherever I go I can make my own environment, breathing my own stuff and not what nature offers and moving in a cloud of my exhalation. Between nature and culture I'm for culture every time.’ Hence the appeal of lighting up even in the most inconvenient circumstances -- up ladders, under cars, on mountainsides, on bikes. It’s an assertion of our self-sufficiency, the mastery of the human over the worst the world can throw at us, of our dominance over nature. (Having written that I'm aware there’s a gender dimension to all this.)

And as such it’s a stance that’s out of fashion. Now we think we’re rejoining nature. (’We’ being, I suppose, more the white middle class.) Once more (the last time being ancient Greece?) we’re animals with bodies that we’re keen to let the air get to, the more the better - just see us on the beach compared with our ancestors of two or three generations back. Any bodily residues on skin or clothing are removed by crazily frequent showering and laundering. Kids at my primary school in the 1940s would wear the same clothes for, it sometimes seemed, the whole winter, including in bed. Farmers, shepherds and navvies, who -- the first two at any rate -- I romantically thought in my teens should be expressing in their dress and mien something of their noble communion with nature, like Tolkienian Elfs or Ents or whatever they’re called, wore old suits and smoked -- and whistled not folk songs but hits from the Light Programme. Nor did they bother about getting soaked: the only rainwear was a sack across the shoulders: let nature -- which is, let’s face it, just a pain half the time when you’re trying to make a living -- do what it will: me, my clothes, my fags and my bits of tunes are all I need to be a king.

The price of symbolic reinforcement from at least one of these cultural appurtenances was cancer and wrecked lungs for some, a risk most of us have judged excessive. But I don’t underestimate the satisfactions of smoking in the open air or despise those who hang on to them. David Hockney, who I reckon a wise man, can’t be all wrong.

The curse of the public schools

The British Academy (posh Regency house above St James’s Park) has brilliant lectures, discussion panels and conferences, all free, on academic topics that are of wide interest. I've attended great events on Vietnam, empires, directions in anthropology, the politics of the Middle East, neuroscience and understanding human evolution and Byron. All the top people in the relevant discipline turn up, such is the distinction of the speakers; the audience is full of white-haired men and women as sharp as nails with sticks and helpers, as well as bright postgraduates and professors from all over the country and key people from quangos, the Science Museum, the Army etc. etc. It’s all so unlike the third-rate world of education in the quality of the proceedings and it’s salutary once in a while to watch the real disciplines doing their stuff at full power. The British Academy, moreover, seems to be one of the few public spaces totally free of New Labour bollocks (which the speakers invariably have a go at at every opportunity) – no targets or accountability or key skills, just scholarship, knowledge and speculation.

Last night was the historians Peter Hennessy and Ross McKibbin on ‘The Fifties: Conflict or Consensus?’. It was really about post-war politics, when there really was a consensus between the mainstream of the parties (NHS, nationalisation of Bank of England, coal and railways, Cold War) up to when it ended – date disputed but probably the early 70s. Then we had twenty years of savage conflict (‘Margaret vs Arthur’ as Hennessy put it – i.e. Thatcher/Scargill), with present Cabinet members (then in their twenties) saying crazy lefty things at conferences; and now we have a consensus again, at the core of which is the doctrine that 40% of national income, plus or minus 2%, is the amount that will be spent on public purposes.

One interesting fact, that came out almost incidentally: during the war Churchill and other intelligent Tories had come to take it for granted that the public schools had had their day and couldn’t survive. It would have been easy to include their abolition in the 1944 Education Act. In fact not a single Labour MP (so Ross McKibbin – I think -- said) voted for the amendment to that effect – sadly, there wasn’t time to hear why not.

It was a huge failure. The price paid for retaining the private sector in education – this is a point that’s obviously true but that I'd never realised until McKibbin briefly stated it, right at the end of the session – was that comprehensive schools were thereby ruled out for many years: if the aristocracy were allowed to retain their privileged education with all the access it afforded, it was not politically feasible to deny the middle class their own privileged route, the grammar schools. So we were stuck with the grammar schools, which has meant in London that we’ve never, as I understand it, had a true comprehensive school, even leaving the private sector out of account.

One more interesting fact (out of very many): in 1946 more boys leaving grammar schools entered engineering than any other profession.