Something tells me the new cigarette is just around the corner

Maybe it was the tension of the situation; a combination of the fear of being refused and the excitement of the dangerous road I was about to embark on, writes Colm O’Regan

Whatever it was, I remember all the details. The shopkeeper had a fierce hairy nose. I’m talking heroically hairy. The kind of ould lad hair-sprouting that is only to be admired. If the man is a bachelor or has a spouse that has given up telling him, if he is left to his own crevices as it were, it can seem as if all the hair has migrated from top of his head to his nostril or the door of the ear. The shop was dark as shops used to be in those days. Before big windows and deli counters and exciting media partnerships with THE COMPETITIVE HEALTH TV programme. The kind of shop that that a dust on the Chomps or a white coating on the Dairy Milks that tasted manky, like American chocolate. The counter was on the right as you went in. And underneath the right hand side of that counter was a box of golf-ball chewing gum. Still the most uncompromising of all the chewing gums, the golf ball. They gave you lock-jaw. Maybe it was aspirational. No one played golf then except the doctor and someone from the Chamber of Commerce. But we cared not for golf because there were no golf ball ching-gums in that box. Instead it held fags. 12p each. That’s where so many smokers started. Local independent shopkeepers, thoughtfully opening the 10-boxes and selling them one by one. In a way it was the most avuncular of illegal dealing.

Recently I saw some teenagers loitering in a playground. I was shepherding a baby around which in a playground is not unlike being a butler. An adult who is invisible but because of a job he does granted exclusive access to an inner sanctum. So the teenagers ignored me and talked about stuff that teenagers talk about: who was taking drugs and