It was always advertised as cool, suave and “the thing to do”. We always saw Peter Stuyvesant ads at the movies, with boats, women and fancy cars and the slogan “Your passport to smoking pleasure!”
During my late high school years, I remember stealing a few “stompies” from the ashtray that my mom never finished completely, hanging out my bedroom window, lighting up and having a few dirty puffs, before flicking the last remnants towards my parents window…
Heading into standard 9 and Matric (grades 11 and 12 for you younger folks) is when I started buying my own boxes, at first coughing my lungs out but wanting to be cool – just as the ads had shown me at the movies and on tv. Not to mention watching my folks smoke it up since before my memory was formed.
Benson & Hedges special mild – that was my brand, well, it was my dad’s brand, so I just took off from there. Parties with my mates, smoking and drinking it up like we were just the bee’s knee’s of the world.
When I finished school and moved down to Cape Town at the start of 1994, I remember one outing I had with my dad and my Ouma (my dad’s mom) to Strand. We walked along the promenade, bought an ice-cream and just enjoyed the day. I was 18 at the time – you know, a man now!
I finished my ice-cream, took out my box, flipped out a stogie and lit up. My dad gave me such a scowl, telling me not to smoke in front of “Ouma” as it was disrespectful. I felt so bad but then my Ouma, in her adorable and loving way, kakked my dad out, telling him that I was a big boy now.
I met my girlfriend – now wife – as a smoker. I was a youth leader as a smoker. I went to church as a smoker. My friends smoked too. Even Debbie partook from time to time.
There were times when I tried to give up, but that was normally due to financial constraints and I didn’t have the dosh to buy a box, so I said “I am trying cold-turkey!”
Didn’t work. As soon as I got paid, it was off to the shops to refill my nicotine needs. Back around 2007, I did try Smokenders, a program which tried to teach you to ween yourself off the addiction through changing habits.
That also didn’t work as I worked in an environment where most people smoked and in the mornings, standing around the factory with our cups of coffee in hand and everyone lighting up – well, that was me, falling off the bus at highspeed.
Fast-forward 7 years and I was unemployed at the time – looking for work. I landed up with double-pneumonia – in hospital for a week. When I came out, I didn’t have the urge to have a smoke, and I thought that I had kicked the habit.
However, the longer I went without the promise of a job, the more stressed I felt. Then, one day, after fetching the kids from school, I darted towards the local shop, bought the kiddies a sweet and cooldrink and then bought myself a box – lit up and almost fell over from dizziness.
Then I got the job at Vox and made myself the promise that when I got my first full paycheck, I would ditch the smokes and turn to electronic smoking – as this seemed a “healthier” option considering that there was no tar and carcinogens as there are in cigarettes.
The plan? Well, it was supposed to be a three-month option to ween myself off nicotine, eventually working my way down to 0% and then to cut it out all together….Yeah right! 10 years later and I was still on the damn thing.
Anyway, come the end of 2024 and I decided to do just that….ween myself off the nicotine, dropping down till eventually I would just stop. And I did – for a time.
The only problem I had now was that I didn’t fall off the bus, I fell off the top of a highspeed bullet train in Japan, hitting the rolling hills around Mount Fuji and tumbling to me death.
I started smoking cigarettes again. At first, bumming from other people. Then, buying my own packets of 10, which lasted me a few days. Then my dad got ill, and the more time I spent with him in his last days, the more I started smoking. It was my own weird and sick justification of spending his last few days with him.
His doctor said he would probably die with a smoke in his mouth, that’s how good his lungs were, but his stomach cancer ate away at him faster than he could recover. And so, up until his final week, I would sit with the old man, have a smoke, mumble crap and just try to enjoy those final few moments, even though I had a heart issue the previous December!
In discussion with Debs, I thought all the stresses of 2025 sent me down the path of cigarettes again. So, went to my doc, had a chat and then he gave me some “happy pills” to get through things.
Not even this made me want to stop. So I carried on. My wife and kids did not take kindly to it – in fact, there we many an argument about it.
Come the end of 2025 and we were planning our little camping trip to the Cederberg mountains near Clanwilliam. I bought a few boxes, calculating how many I would need to last me the five nights away. Debbie had asked me just before we left “when was I going to give up? Not for her sake or mine, but for the kids’ sake?”
“I am going to start my new job on the 5th Jan and I will use that as my motivation to start anew. New year, new job, and new me…so to speak,” I said.
Debs looked at me as she had done so many times before over the years, with the look of “sure….I’ve heard that before”.
This time I was really going to go for it. I wanted to. I HAD to!
So, on our final night at Jamaka camp site, sitting in front of our final fire, with the final few logs of wood crackling away in flames, I took the final cigarette out of the final box, lit up and enjoyed what would become my last cigarette.