One of the few advantages of reaching the halfway point of life is the murky mix of pleasure and pain in realizing that you live in a world that is going in a different direction than yours. Just as, no matter how hard I try, my brain will never adapt to the TikTok universe and the tons of images in hyper-fast succession that populate the media (replacing an increasingly marginal and hastily written letter), I will have to get used to the fact that activities as different in dignity as reading and heteropatriarchal jokes will be parading towards the cemetery. This will happen with one of the few habits that makes my life happier; namely, smoking. No matter how I feel about it, the art of tasting tobacco (in my case, ten Davidoff Gold cigarettes a day and two Upmann Half Corona cigars, after lunch and after dinner; all religiously) will soon be an anachronism of old people or anachronistic flâneurs.
First, smoking was banned in bars, eliminating tobacco smoke as a very important element of the intangible heritage of bars and jazz concerts; then the prohibitionists attacked the terraces, forcing the long-suffering addicts to the clouds that emerge from their lips to take refuge in dark, urinated corners like paid ladies (the comparison, I know, is also old and very outdated). Now, finally, I learn that the municipal authorities of Barcelona want to ban tobacco from our beaches and are planning to approve an ordinance (how many old words in today's La Punyalada, mamma mia!) according to which repeat beach smokers will soon be fined with minor penalties of about thirty euros. The ban, it seems, will be effective next July, so, dear fellow vice-addicts, take advantage of spring to suck on that cigarette before it's too late.
At home, I must say it frankly, the act of smoking by the ocean among children and sandcastles has always seemed to us something typical of delinquents. In fact, there I only smoke at night, when I approach Barceloneta and take advantage of the city's last nap, naked and lazy, to burn the penultimate Davidoff of the day. On the other hand, I detest beaches and, if I were to spend a morning in the sun, it would not seem like any fascist imposition to have to travel from the sand to the edge of Mar Bella so that children and professionals of offense do not inhale my smoke. I hope, however, that the meritorious Guardia Urbana of my city does not steal (even more) money from me if I get a little closer to the sand to smoke a Davidoff in the middle of the night, with the sole company of the tired dunes of the Olympic Village. I am an exemplary taxpayer, an tireless walker, and I would say I am not asking for the moon.
I am aware that, in a few lustrums, our smoking habit will end up as a kind of anachronistic activity that can only be carried out in private clubs or thanks to baristas and restaurateurs who creatively skirt legality (fortunately, in Barcelona there are still many). I understand the human and administrative impulse to prolong our lives, and I also understand that the City Council does not buy into my smoker's ethics according to which one of the many luxuries of tobacco consists of slowly committing suicide in a very civilized manner. My vice will be a thing of the past very soon, and when future readers admire my prose they will do so with a disapproving grimace, accusing me of being vulgar. Fortunately, I accept the passage of time with a militant stoicism and, may it be so for many years, my columns do not fall into the dreadful nostalgia of the boomers of La Vanguardia. Good things, like erections, come to an end and that's that.
At home, I must say it frankly, the act of smoking by the ocean among children and sandcastles has always seemed to us something typical of delinquentsMy liberal friends will write very angry texts against the communist-like administration and its castrating-prohibitive zeal. I buy their underlying thesis, of course, but I must also say that infantilizing citizens and treating smokers as if they were outcasts is not an original idea of Ada Colau and her propagandists. Barcelona has long forgotten its Mediterranean condition and its fellow citizens, clouded by an absurd pretension to turn us all into exemplary Nordics, have become very grayish.But all cities on the planet, like it or not, segregate smokers with a zeal for cleanliness close to papism. Looking for the positive side of the issue, the new gulag for addicts will create unprecedented mysterious solidarities and, upon seeing a biped sucking on a cigar in a corner, smokers will soon embrace him as if the specimen in question were Jesus resurrected himself.
As a notary of the past, I simply state that I smoked on the beaches of Barcelona, after absurd adolescent coitus, opulent meals even more dreadful of poorly fried paellas, and nights of alcoholism that my psychiatrist has forbidden me, appealing to science. I had a great time. From now on, I will smoke in secret... and I hope the police don't catch me. After all, it's only thirty bucks.
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