Update: Archive extended

I have been cleaning up some folders and came across some youthful miscellaneous pieces I thought I’d add to my archive.

There’s a trio of articles on, respectively, coffee, fish and chips, and samoosas that I wrote for Student Life in 1997 (now called SL). And there’s one on smoking, published at the now defunct World Online (Tiscali, South Africa). The Student Life articles never appeared online, while the World Online piece has disappeared, obviously due to databases suffering the vagaries of time and corporate acquisition (see http://worldonline.co.za).

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The Joys of Smoking

(originally published at World Online, 16 August 2001. Alas, it’s no longer online.)

I LOVE life. I love it because I love smoking. I’m drinking coffee and smoking away as I write this. At my desk, in my room, where I CAN smoke.

Not too long ago, at some literary thing in Cape Town, I bump into the editor, skulking like James Woods behind the giant Strelitzia, sunglasses in one hand and dragging on an absolute or final light cigarette. ‘Fuck! Absolute lights!’ I laugh in derision.

As scum of the earth, we naturally huddle around our common plight. ‘The last enclave of offense against bourgeois health,’ I joke.