RIP smoking, a lethal pastime. But strangely, some of us will mourn it

Cigarettes are a biker-capped Marlon Brando, Berlin-era David Bowie, Winona Ryder bomb-blasted at the finale of Heathers. They are the accompaniment to Otis Redding’s coffee, three of them sit in Patsy Cline’s ashtray, they are Oscar Wilde’s perfect type of a perfect pleasure. Cigarettes are also Nigel Farage, white-boxed health warnings on opaque couché, and the death of a friend’s much-loved father.

They are the first drag at a dry-ice-fumed house party in 1991 and the last smoke, in a back garden in 2015. They are a constant companion for decades and a distant, still enticing reminder of youth. They are nostalgia and reality, glamour and disease, sex and death. And soon, according to Public Health England, they will be “eradicated”: the last smoker in the country quitting by the year 2030.

Despite less than 15% of adults admitting to being smokers, to me, 12 years to full abstinence seems rather fleet for a community not known for its speed. The cultural pull of tobacco, its hardiness in the face of hostility, may be weaker than it once was – those who would have smoked until they dropped are mostly now fogged in clouds of vape – but its survival instincts are those of a cockroach in the aftermath of an atomic strike. Eleven years ago, I watched as pubs erected smoking shelters for the incoming smoking ban; I don’t see them pulling them down in the near future.

During my first hiatus from smoking, I wrote a collection of stories on the subject of smoking cigarettes: the denials, the delusions and the delights. Like my palate returning and my sense of smell sharpening, the continued allure of cigarettes became somewhat clearer. Now having quit, I saw they gave grammar and punctuation to the everyday, provided a routine that meant stretches of tedium could be tempered with a quick flash of the lighter. They had a social imperative, smokers forming the strongest of bonds in the last remaining smoking rooms or shivering outside factories and offices. They were defiance, rebellion – not for nothing does the real smoker hold their cigarette between a V of fingers – and a shaken fist at mortality. If I’m going down, they said, I’m going down by my own hand.

Last week, I was in an out-of-the way pub in West Sussex, at a window seat looking out over a small but well-populated smoking area. From inside, I watched a young man sitting beside a much older man, rolling cigarettes as quickly as he could smoke them. His older companion reached for his Benson & Hedges – impossible to see the pack, but you can always recognise a man who smokes Bensons – three times in under 15 minutes. The young man wanting to look older; the old man clinging to his carefree youth. Such magnificent self-delusions, cigarettes: so easily reached for.

For cigarettes are the grand delusion. Smoke one and you think you’re Audrey, Marlon, Winona; but more likely you are Farage – wheezing, gusting into smoke-free zones with your sweet-sour stink, gazed at pityingly by the given-up and never smoked. But it doesn’t matter, you keep on. Keep up the ghost of your youth, show off your streak of non-conformity. Though they become mundane, a part of a routine, cigarettes still have that magic, that transformative power. It’s why people daily, gladly, inch themselves closer to the grave.

We will not mourn the passing of so lethal a pastime; an activity that has killed so many friends, family and lovers. And yet some of us will miss it so. The contradictions of the smoker!

Some of us will, when the last butt is crushed out, remember the cigarette shared after sex, the short daily thrill of the removal of cellophane, the pull of foil, the freshness of the deck of 20, the perfection of a well-blown smoke ring. Some of us will lament the passing of an era blurred by smoke, toasted with its scent, given atmosphere by the casual lighting of a Gauloise, a Park Drive, a Lucky Strike. Some of us will doff our hats at an age in which the cigarette was elegance, then edge, then transgression. And some of us will bow our heads to the time when we were young, and thought ourselves immortal.

• Stuart Evers is the author of Ten Stories About Smoking