On dead parrots and smoking
I haven’t wanted a cigarette since 2013. It was long past midnight and my friend Ilaria and I had ended up at a moving out party in an art studio in Hoxton for a person both of us vaguely knew through current and past boyfriends. People were chatting in a labyrinth of small rooms. A projector lit up an impromptu dance floor in the middle of the maze. I was tipsy. I took a photograph of a spider on a window. We left the party wobbly-legged and defiant and stopped outside one of the brightly lit Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland. I had a cigarette. And as I smoked it (I was an occasional party smoker) I thought “why am I doing this, it’s stupid and it tastes really, really bad”. My friend knew the badness of it. She’s a neuroscientist who works with cancer. I smoked and I said to myself, this will be the last cigarette I will ever smoke.
And it was.
And I didn’t even want to.
Until now.
When I was young I read about cool girls who smoked and felt angsty and thought about boys and wrote impressive poetry. So when I felt particularly angsty or rebellious I thought of cigarettes. I was a good girl, so it felt supremely and deliciously bad to smoke. It was something I did when all of the being good and responsible started to feel like a heavy backpack. Damn it felt good to chuck it to one side, to light up and blow smoke out of the window. As I said, I was a good girl.
And now I want a cigarette. Now I’m fantasising about a cigarette and a large amber pint in a dim pub somewhere near Fleet Street. This is of course highly unrealistic as you can’t even smoke in pubs anymore, but if you could, and if there wasn’t a pandemic, I would go to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese off a narrow alleyway off Fleet Street and I would sit myself down next to Polly. I would stare at his grey feathers and into his dead eyes and I would ask “what do you think about all of this?”.
Polly is of course a dead parrot. He died in 1926 after watching over the patrons in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for over thirty years. When he died it made the news, he was described as an “expert in profanity”.
What would he make of all of this? Maybe he would make his famous imitation of a wine cork being popped and the “glug, glug, glug” that followed.
Maybe he would say. “Write it all down”. That’s what the boys and girls on Fleet Street did in his time, they were hard working, and often hard drinking, journalists.
Maybe it’s the pen and not the cigarette I’m looking for.
– More about Polly and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese here.