The loneliness of the long-distance smoker.

So you’re on a train passing through Siberia, it’s minus 40 outside (C or F, it’s the same at that point), and you decide to go out to the open area between carriages for a smoke.

Since you’re a smoker, thus fully acclimatised to being outside in all weathers, you wear a T-shirt, shorts and slippers. The antismoking drones will still call you weak.

Instead of ending up between carriages, you open the wrong door, tumble out into the frozen Siberian wilderness from a moving train, then run after that train for just over four miles (7 km) until you reach a tiny station. Still wearing, remember, a T-shirt, shorts and slippers. And it’s still -40. And you’re in the Siberian wilderness where large hungry things will eat you. And you’re a smoker and therefore incapable of running at all. And… you suffer no ill effects whatsoever, requiring nothing more than a cup of tea to restore you to normality.

So, is that the story of a weak and feeble smoker? Yes. Yes it is.

The comments are, of course, predictable since they are from the Antismoker Manual. The drones don’t need to read or understand any article that has ‘smoker’ in it, their Pavlovian conditioning kicks in and they regurgitate the same comments every time. Perhaps they are better described as ‘vomments’ since they spew forth without the intervention of what passes for a brain. No matter what anyone achieves, if they are a smoker they are weak and feeble and inferior. Like Einstein or Churchill and people of that ilk.

It was unfortunate that this smoking version of Rambo didn’t catch up with his train. He’d left his lighter on it.