Cinnamon sticks don't count but .....
Me and Brian Tease, 10 years old, up on the church hall roof. Ten wee Regal between us ... smoked them all. Small wonder then that my old dad, who had a nose like a bloodhound at the best of times, sussed me out before I was even half way up the garden path. Beat the living shit out of me. Did it stop me though ? Well, yeah ... for a while anyway.
( Ramsay Tupper, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 21:21, Reply)

Standard Fireworks
My first smoke, age 15, was the red cottony taper from a box of Standard Fireworks. Oddly enough no effect.
However, two years later, living in the garage behind the parent's house through the winter (kids eh?) I really enjoyed rollies with vanilla baccy whilst watching Cell Block H. Nostalgic memories!
(lord nose, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 21:07, Reply)

Wrath of God stuff!
Many years ago, my gran and grandad held Christmas parties for the family around their nice big house: generally the kids drunk fizzy pop and ran around all hyper and the uncles would drink a bit too much - all good though.

One year, the conversation got onto religion: my uncle - a hairy beardy man who used to smoke far too much for anyones good - telling everyone that if God does exist then he must be some sort of bastard: I mean, what sort of God allows the suffering in the world?

This blasphemy went on for about five minutes or so: ending with the statement "may God strike me down if I'm wrong but if he does exist, he's the biggest fool there is".

Going to light a cigarette after his religious rant, his lighter blew up in his face and took out his beard and mustache in one ball of flame.

Not sure if this is a lesson in why smoking can be bad for you in unique ways or why you shouldn't insult higher deities: but on both counts, I try to keep my nose clean ;)
(paulplex erm, hi..., Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:59, Reply)

i watched pulp fiction,constantine and breakfast at tiffanys two months ago,and i haven't stopped since.smoking is sexy and cool.
(Fuckpig "That's not even a pound a midget.", Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:58, Reply)

Beech leaf fags
Tobacco's for sissies.

This was my first smoke. I was 11 years old.

Ingredients:
1) Broadsheet newpaper.
2) Some beech leaves.
3) Prittstick.

Tear a page out of the newpaper and fold in two length ways.
Place about 15 handfuls of beech leaves along the crease. Roll up and seal with Prittstick.

This is a smooth, refreshing smoke and results in a singed fringe and a deep manly voice.
Don't be alarmed when the end bursts in to flames. Tastes best when smoked down the woods.
( The Duke of Prunes, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:53, Reply)

Scents and associations
On the summer when I was a racetrack groom I was smoking as much as I ever did- about a half a pack a day at my heaviest, which translates to about 10 a day. Not that I could really afford it at the time, but what the hell- who needs food, right? Besides, a pack of cigarettes helped keep my appetite at bay.

I might add here that I was my current height of 5' 11", but weighed about 90 lbs less than I do now- about 130 or so, I would guess. (That's what, about 9 stone? Just for you British types...) So this was not necessarily the smartest thing to do, but as I said, I couldn't afford much.

Anyway, let me set the scene for you. I was 19 and came from a rather sheltered background, one where I was in the city during the week for school and isolated in the woods on the weekends. I had had about zero control over my own life at that point, and it was really chafing at me badly- I wanted to be free to do as I thought best. I had gone to school for electronics because that's what the parents thought would be a good trade for me, but it turned out that my mind doesn't deal well enough with total abstractions to be good at that. I had terrible fights with them over this, and had an older girlfriend who was encouraging me to make a break for independence. So that summer I informed my parents that I was in fact not coming home for the summer, preferring to make my own way and pay for my own damn food and not have to answer to them or anyone else. With the girlfriend's help I got a job as a groom and did exactly that.

In retrospect it was a very difficult summer, spent among some of the true dregs of society- basically homeless vagrants, runaways and completely uneducated people to whom a book was something that only braniacs and faggots ever bothered with. I stood out to say the least, as I have a very extensive vocabulary and a sharp wit. I didn't have a drug or alcohol problem, which also set me apart- and probably was what made me an attractive employee to the stables I worked for. But I learned how to fit in and work alongside them, and I pulled my weight.

That summer was spent outdoors, starting in May. Mornings started out with bad coffee and whatever I could get for a buck at the track cafeteria, generally a couple of candy bars, and lunch and dinner were little better- generally Kraft macaroni and cheese with a can of tuna mixed in, or something equally cheap and horrid. Hard physical work and little food stripped me down to the skeletal condition described above- but damn it, I was free.

For me, the smell of cigarettes will often take me back to those days in late spring where my belly was snarling from the lack of food, I was bone tired and covered in grime and the sweat of horses as well as my own- but to me it was heaven to stand there in the mornings with the bad coffee and the cigarettes and the scent of hay mingled with the earthy smell of the stalls. I smoked my cigarettes and tasted adulthood and freedom.

And that's why I've never fully given them up.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:51, 1 reply)

I've never smoked, and no one in my immediate family does either.
However, let me share with you a story. My grandfather was a heavy smoker throughout most of his life. He was a working-class man (a self-employed carpenter), and it was just the done thing in his day to take up smoking and be a man. He married an Irish girl, and started raising a family on the south coast of England.

Unfortunately he managed to catch quite a severe case of tuberculosis when my father was a small child, and although he recovered, his lungs were never really in stellar shape afterwards. He was strongly advised by his doctor to give up the cigarettes, and he did, for a little while, but he eventually fell back into old habits. Even though he was coughing and wheezing far worse than ever, he kept on puffing away, stubborn as he was. It all came to a head though, about 20 years ago when he managed to catch pneumonia.

My father will tell you that he managed to catch it because he walked to the cinema in the rain without an umbrella. However he caught it, it put him in a serious state. Being self employed, he put off seeing the doctor until the last minute, that last minute being the emergency room after being brought in on an ambulance. The combination of the scarring caused but the TB, the damage from the cigarettes and the devastation from the pneumonia meant that the only way the doctors had a hope of saving his life was by removing a fair part of his right lung.

When he awoke he was surrounded by his family. My aunt, who was about twelve at the time (he had 5 kids, she was the youngest) was crying her heart out. She made him promise that he would never touch a cigarette again, as the doctors had said if he kept at it he would likely never get to see her grow up. She was terrified that she would be left without a father at such a young age. He swore to her that he would never go near tobacco again, and he quit cold turkey. He never used patches and gum (not that he really had the money to spend on them), he just ended 30 odd years of smoking through willpower alone, and he was true to his word, he never touched a cigarette from then on until the day he died.

This happened a couple years before I was born. When I think back to my grandfather, I always remember him as a great man with a brilliant sense of humour who would always play with me, give me sweets and spare change, and would buy me fantastic toys. He died peacefully in his sleep (somewhat ironically of heart failure) when I was 6, and while I wish that I had had more time with him, I'm thankful that he had the willpower in the end to give up the cigarettes which would have no doubt shortened those already precious few years I had with him.

And he got to live to see his daughter grow up, he died shortly after her 21st birthday.
( Lightguy hail satan, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:50, Reply)

French exchange students
Yup, those shoplifting, fleece-wearing, impossibly attractive bastards.

They can't get their preferred strong French fags (Gitanes or Gauloises) over here at a sensible price, so what do they do?

Buy B&H and cut off the filter tips with a pair of scissors. Their throats must be lined with asbestos or something.
(rogerzilla, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:42, Reply)

United are 2 nil up
There’s a housing estate there now, but back when it was just the haunted house, it was where me and my pal used to hang out. Every day at weekends or holidays, just before first thing in the morning, I’d leave my parents’ cheaply built house on the estate and walk down the road to his house. We’d walk through the building sites, throwing stones at the diggers asleep in the lines drawn ambitiously on the chalk soil of the South of England, down into where the old village was and then up past the Rampant Cat, past the Chase and turn right into the grounds of the Haunted House.

The haunted house was magical in the dew dazed, sleepy coated, sun lit, swallow flighted jaunty, lolling lazed mornings. We’d fight lines of obedient Germans or throw pebbled shaped depth charges at the frogs which dwelt at the slime at the bottom of the old swimming pool. I never was brave enough to enter the house. As sad as yesterday to a boy dreaming of tomorrow, the house was in mourning for itself. Trees hung droopy as Victorian moustaches around its door, windows as broken as the hopes the house had had for the people who had grown up and left it. There was a rumour of a German helmet which was supposedly upstairs in one of the vast, dark, oakpanneld wood wormed , gossamer webbed rooms. But there were rumours of ghosts too. Terrible ghosts. (Years later, in a squat on microdots those ghosts would rouse themselves from my dreams and chase me, screaming into the night, to the bemusement of my then love)

I’d wait outside, fearful, hopping restless from one foot to another, while he went in through the broken window. The house was as quiet as a the memory of a bad memory. I’d try not to count time, feeling the pebble fat and ready in my hand, the smoothness going round and round and drawing warmth from the dirty, nascent lifelines and contours of my palms, feeling how tense my legs were to run away. Hours would pass, then weeks as the sun hung, indulgent and motionless in the sky and after a lifetime, he’d clamber out, proud at my embarrassment and we’d go and check on our stores of sticks which looked like guns. Then the orchard would be the jungle and the lankly nettles which loitered, cocky and acid tounged against the trees would be the japs. We’d fix bayonets and charge.

I probably spent a year at the grounds of that house, certainly loving them more and knowing it better than the last man who had locked the door of that house and left it. Most of the time was either spent imagining enemies, or making plans. We’d dig tunnels incase the Argies kicked off again. We’d build a den and run away. We’d write a book about it all one day.


As the years passed the games changed. The germans became communists, then the Irish, and then we made peace with them all and the sticks which looked like they might be guns lay, unloved and mouldy in their caches.

Hunting ghosts became hunting rabbits with the airgun we had hidden in the nettle valley, then the hunt evolved again- unspoken, unplanned and unstoppable - into a hunt for pornography in the hedges by the road. Then the hunt became the riding of the motorbike he’d bought for £30 (another fortune I’d lent him)

And the village, stealthy, was creeping up on the house. The road we lived on became a street and building sites turned into rows of managerial type houses (each as straight lined and regimented as the imaginary Germans we used to gun down). The tarmac encircled the grounds and the bricks and the mortar were unloaded in a clearing in the orchard. (It took us months to clear that place of nettles, it took them less than a sunny afternoon to tear the whole place down),

“Here look what I got” he said, tugging the packet of Silk Cut out of his pockets. He took a box of matches from the other. A month ago, a lifetime, we’d said how we could set the whole world alight with just one box of Englands’ Glory. Now I watched as his dirty fingers tore the cellophane off and opened the lid. He peeled the tin foil back and rolled it into a ball. I watched as he pressed it into the soft, obliging soil. Then he carefully turned the packet upside down, tapped it soft, turned it back and tugged soft at the cigarette he’d chosen. I watched the long thing cigarette as he tugged it with his thickening fingers. He put it so that the filter was between his thumb and trigger finger, holding the cigarette inside his balled fist. Then I watched it as he put it into his mouth, gripping it cheerful with his lips. He struck the match and I saw the flame of the sulphur then the quick hisss as the paper caught. He drew in a drag, deep and dark and smokily sure. He held it, moving the fag down, away from his face and his new fringe. He exhaled with a sigh and smoke through his nose.

He’d done this before, and for some reason I felt something which made me feel ashamed.

“Here” he said, and handed the cigarette to me. He had his back to the house but I didn’t and I watched the house. I watched it as I lifted the cigarette. I watched it with a feeling that I wouldn’t know had a name if no one had told me about it.

I drew a drag. Everyone said you got sick the first time, but I wasn’t. Not then. Later, much later, but not then.

A very little while later the haunted house was gone and the next time I went that way, years later, by accident on purpose, I sneered at a man in a blue short sleeved polo shirt briskly washing his Mercedes.
(sirolimus, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:40, Reply)

Don't smoke
Never have, and never really intend to.

So instead I'll tell you a story from last year, in the town of sunny San Diego...

I had gone down to the beach with a bunch of friends - stopped on the way at this truly mindbogglingly good mexican takeout and grabbed a crate of pacifico.

Spent pretty much the whole afternoon just lazing on the beach, swimming, playing with the dog, the perfect summers afternoon. Get home, shower, get ready to go out in the evening.

Only my watch isn't there. I think back to the last time I had it - must have been on the beach when I went for a swim; I put it on my towel and dived in, then when we were leaving I flicked all the sand off my towel and packed it away. Oops. Still, a good night is there to be had and we can always go back and look for the watch tomorrow.

Fast forward to the next morning and I'm combing the beach with my buddy. No luck at first so I take to asking the other beach users if they've found a watch; I get a chorus of noes until I ask one guy - the conversation went something like:

Me: have you found a watch?

Guy: Nope, sorry. You lost it here?

Me: Yeah, I think so - guess it's lost

Guy: Bummer. You smoke?

Me: No

*Guy looks up at me with the most incredulous look*

Guy: You don't smoke anything?

Bless, I realised later that he was basically offering to smoke me out as compensation for a lost watch. You can say what you like about America - Californians are among the most hospitable folk I've ever met :)
(Kendal, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:40, 1 reply)

First time
A friend of mine at school was in receipt of one of the ultimate parental lessons. Straight out of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, he asked his mother about smoking (at the age of 6). His mother was of course very obliging and even lit his little ciggie.

He coughed, spluttered, choked and ended up throwing up all over his mother's nice clean kitchen. Felt like shite for a few days after that.

Unfortunately, the lesson didn't take properly, he took up smoking at 13 and still hasn't quit at 22.
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:37, Reply)

Marcus Skeet
gave me my first cigarette

though I'd already smoked weed previously

I was disappointed, and still am

weed is so much better
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:33, Reply)

Puffers
Back in the day, when I was a rebellious 14yr old, me and one mate of the day would sneak off to "the hill" to make small bonfires and smoke those dried hollow plants that sometimes grow/appear in the English countryside in summer. This was a because we were too young to buy real cigarettes but wanted to be 'ard and try it anyway, coughing our guts up while trying to pretend it was "good shit man" - it was fucking awful in retrospect.

Yeah, I cringe while writing this too. Once we tried stuffing these plants with dried leaves "for extra flavour" like, and we packed a couple in bog-roll and headed into town - proudly puffing away on these home-made abominations as we walked town-wards.
One trampy looking fella approached us enquiring "say lads, don't suppose you've got a spare cigarette?". Naturally, we oblidged and offered him one of the pre-made puffers we'd packed, which he gladly accepted and off he went.

I saw him several months later; having given up puffers pretty much the day after we gave him one (thank god), and he asked the same question. I said to him "I'm out mate, but you're the guy I gave a puffer to back in [insert month here] right?! How was it?". He replied "Yeah mate! It was bangin' like! Proper fucked me right up....mental!" in that raspy trampy fashion they talk in.

I hadn't the heart to tell him what they really were; he probably assumed it was some kind of exotic splif of some kind, but apparently he had a good time anyway...

Length? Can't remember, but it "fucks you right up!" apparently.
( slippery doctore, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:29, Reply)

I started smoking because of national rail
My train was late, I was bored, I was 18.

I thought, "why not try smoking?"

And I've loved it ever since. YUM!
(thesophie .tumblr..com, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:29, 2 replies)

One of
the best stand-up routines I've ever seen was by a guy called Adam Bloom. It goes something like this...

"So, you're going out with a girl, and you really like her, but you're scared that she'll leave you. And she doesn't smoke.

So, when she comes round, when you say hello and kiss her, stick a Nicorette patch on the back of her neck. When you say goodbye and hug her, you take it off.

So if that person ever leaves you they'll get an incredible craving, think it's love and come running back to you..."
(silencer, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:28, Reply)

First Cigarette/Spliff
Scene: teenage house party that I was only just cool enough to be invited to.

A group had gathered out the back to watch the coolest member of the group roll a spliff, it was slowly passed round a large group of people with reverence. I was about half way round and it being my first time with anything smoke based I was not sure what to do.

So I sucked.... really sucked! Smoke tickled my throat and I coughed. Unfortunately I still had the spliff in my mouth. It exploded with some force into tiny pieces.

The cool guy just muttered "that was the last of my weed"

I was asked to leave.
( Wildyles is back to rimming chimps, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:28, Reply)

Ah, cigarettes, I love you so...
My introduction to nicotine wasn't anything to do with trying to look cool to impress the boys, more to do with a rogue family member getting me into cannabis. I did enjoy a summer-holiday toke, leaning out the bedroom window looking at the stars and getting the giggles (sadly missed now I'm a paranoid adult) and this continued for a good few summers. After a while I noticed I'd miss these occasional smokes, and would, for some reason, really really want one at times when it wasn't available. I then took to seeking nub-ends (I know) and smoking those when I could.

Then one day I ended up smoking a cigarette end by accident. Miraculously, my need for a joint disappeared, and I realised it wasn't the cannabis I was missing at all, but the nicotine. I figured that would be a good time to try and stop this nub-end seeking, and did, and for a while everything was ok.

Then I went to my first festival...

I figured it would be a good call to buy some tobacco before I left, and bought my first ever fags (a small packet of amber leaf with the free dodgy papers, and an automatic lighter, because I couldn't use flint lighters at this point). When we arrived, I found we were drugless, and that familiar need arrived. So me, my mates Rhiannon and Vicky all rolled a cigarette and looked up at the sun setting over Reading campsite while I had my first ever intentional non-drugs cigarette.

8 years on I've given up cannabis because of the fear, and now smoke between 20-30 roll-ups a day, with every desire to quit but no willpower whatsoever. If I could go back in time to that festival and tell myself not to be a twat, I'd gladly do so.
( SugarSpunSister Yeah, whatever, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:27, 1 reply)

Smoking girlfriends
Well, not literally. I mean they were girlfriends who smoked rather than me smoking the girlfriends.

When I worked in a hotel in London I fancied a girl called Alice. (Thats almost her real name.)
I was 21, she was 19, and was already known as slack Alice because of her tendancy to take blokes to bed almost as soon as she met them.
THIS WAS NOT MY REASON TO FANCY HER!!
One day we were shopping in Oxford Street, she'd just lit up and then spotted a top she wanted to look at.
So muggings here is handed a fag, and she vanished into the shop.
I'd honestly never tried a cigarette before, and took a drag.
Nothing.
Another drag.
Still nothing.
I finished the fag.
My mouth tasted like crap, but I'd got no pleasure from it.
BUT I could understand the pleasure of having something in my mouth.

A couple of days later I tried my first spliff.
That gave me a headache as well as a sore throat and a horrible tasting mouth.

I never got very far with her, and shortly afterwards she left, but I do still wonder how she is sometimes.

Shortly afterwards, another girl came to work there, another smoker, and she tried to get me hooked with no success. (27 yrs later I still know her, she still smokes, I still don't.)

In the nearly 30 yrs since my first fag I reckon I've had just about enough to count on my fingers, and 5 of them were smoked one after the other when I was really peed off one day.
(paof2 Nude might not be rude, but rude could be nude..., Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:27, Reply)

OK you got me
yes it was to impress a bird I fancied. A gorgeous blonde called Kayleigh. Older than me (I think she was 28), an ex model who dressed sexily in a very sort of elfy fantasy style way which really suited her - all satin corsets, tiny skirts, thigh boots and a cloak. She was lovely. And she definitely fancied me.

Unfortunately, on the night when we were blatantly about to get together, I found out she was married and she found out I was only 17, not the 25 she'd assumed.

Bugger.
( Afinkawan Yes I can hear you Clem Fandango, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:24, Reply)

my first cigarette was a tampon
when you're young you can't tell the difference.
both make you sick but tampon smoke may well be a little better for you, so I recommend them to anyone trying to cut down.
(Nobody Likes Mortal Wombat, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:21, 2 replies)

around that youthful age of 13
on the way home from school we put kitchen towel paper in a plastic sweet container. and smoked it. i was coughing like a bastard all week
(ewe, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:19, Reply)

I've never had a cigarette, hopefully never will
But both my parents smoke cigars all day every day. My mother didn't even bother to stop when she was pregnant with me, nor when it was discovered that I had asthma. The smoke leaves every imaginable surface covered in a disgusting, brown slime of nicotine, which gives me a buzz if I try to clean it off.

It's gotten to the point where the windows have to be cleaned every week or else you can't see out of them. And so I have been put off smoking forever. I'm moving out in August, but until then I'm fucked. Yay.

Oh, and the cigars smell like burnt anus. That's wonderful too.
( trintrin has jam for blood, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:18, 4 replies)

I only smoke joints
I think I've only ever had three puffs of an actual cigarette (although I've rolled desperation 'joints' that were probably close). I'm definitely addicted, presumably to nicotine, but interestingly my body doesn't associate that need with cigarettes, which means that no matter how desperate I get in times of dooblessness, it would never occur to me just to smoke a fag (although see above...). Conversely, I've never liked smoking weed on its own. Just joints.

Given a limitless supply, I'll smoke myself stupid. The only way I keep it under control is not to buy any for a few months. I get ganja dreams.

I blame my mother - she got me started. Complained that I didn't have any vices. It's still pretty much the only one - I've never been much of a one for alcohol, and I don't drink tea or coffee either. Chocolate is the only other one.

Length: too much; hummous: not enough. Ah well.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:17, Reply)

pipe
chugging on a old mans pipe with cherry tobacco thinking it would make it taste nicer it really doesnt, sitting outside in the rain making a pft pft pft pft effect while puffing like a WWII fighter pilot ,i was only 15
(yousatonmybiscuits liberty city has the worst cab drivers, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:16, Reply)

Your first...
Next week... your first beer!
Then... your first shag!
Then... your first newspaper! Did you read the news intently or did you flick straight to the comics? LOLZORZ!!!!!!!111111111

I've seen some really interesting ideas in the suggestions thread, but they're never chosen...
(joepublic 's opinion does not represent that of the public, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:15, 3 replies)

Weed in English Room 11
I was once offered a spliff in my GCSE English class - the girl offering it smoked them with her dad. I declined, but am willing to smoke weed now (if I had the opportunity).

I've never smoked a cigarette, contrary to what I tell some people. Maybe I think it makes me look good to allude to smoking.
( its_hatorah_bitch is b3ta the devil you know on, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:14, Reply)

Too scared to buy cigarettes...
...so I smoked teabags instead, using a 'pipe' cunningly fashioned out of a wooden pencil case.

There was a definite art to it - you needed a lot of air to get the tea leaves going, and we found that PG Tips had a mellow flavour that didn't leave your throat feeling like it had been sandpapered or ravaged by rabid stoats.

On a weekend Scout camp, half a dozen 14-year-olds smoked their way through a catering pack of 320 teabags before near fatal experiments with dock leaves, nettles and various moulds and fungi.

I wouldn't know the long-term health costs to my teenage PG Tips habit, but I notice that those chimps have mysteriously disappeared from our screens...
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:08, Reply)

Give Up
Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times...
( sausagesucker just paid £5.00 for a cup of Tea!, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 20:05, Reply)

Stolen from the babysitter
I was 8 years old and the babysitter was taking me for a swimming lesson.
She was grumbling about how much she hated me and didn't want to take me swimming.
I decided to be a brat and steal the lit cigarette out of her hand. I ran off down the road with it whilst she screamed after me that she was going to kill me. So I decided to annoy her more by taking a big drag on her cigarette. Next thing I knew I was doubled over coughing and the baby sitter was giving me a spanking.
You'd think that would have put me off smoking , but it didn't work as 4 years later I was smoking my own. Not been spanked whilst smoking since then though. Which is a bit of a shame really.
( BUTT FART is currently addicted to Improbable Island, Wed 19 Mar 2008, 19:52, Reply)