The "fumoirs" at Zurich airport are so elegant, glassy and alluring that I half-wanted to take up smoking again last week. I have staggered past their British airport equivalents catching planes, those sad little pens of shame and have felt comfortable with my decision to quit seven years back. Zurich almost tempted me back into the fold.
The relaxed Winston room (see left) looked as cool and fun as a London boutique hotel's cocktail bar. The etching of the brand and the well-typset English health warning, "tobacco can seriously damage your health" on the glass frontage just added to an appetising feel that dragging at a Winston is not only cool, but somehow cleansing and healthy, sensual, minty even. Why is it that the idea of smoking up in the snowy Swiss mountains or down on a sunny Mediterranean beach might seem somehow less injurious than puffing away in the damp cities of the Thames valley?
I had almost forgotten how powerful smoking is as an idea - 'Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call "a negative pleasure": a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the "bad" taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility.' Lovely. Better to have loved and lost.
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