Cigarette Packets Quotes

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

WARNING: UNHAPPY ENDING! she wrote. If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand.

I pulled a packet of Cold Flake from my pocket. “Cliff, you’re a marvel. Will you have a cigarette?” “It ’ud be like givin’ a pig a strawberry,” the little man replied,

I found that I was reaching, automatically, for another cigarette; my eyes and throat felt hot and aching, and my brain stupid. I let it slip back into the packet. I had smoked too much that evening already.

Life is like a cigarette and the world is a cigarette packet...!!!

My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.' 'Oh.' 'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all.

A bottle of wine. A family-sized packet of Nacho Cheese Flavoured Tortilla Chips and a jar of hot salsa dip. A packet of cigarettes on the side (I know, I know). The rain hammering against the windows. And a book. What could have been lovelier?

Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.

Computers can destroy people’s memory systems – because there will be no need. You can keep a small computer the size of a cigarette packet in your pocket: it contains everything that you will ever need to know.

On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet - everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed - no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around.

He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet.

As far as he was aware, none of his school friends knew what it was like to come home to a house that was quiet the way his was, where everything was forbidden to them—loud music or talking back, wearing shirts with band logos printed on them. A father who yelled, a mother who looked out the window or spent the day praying and tending her garden. A family that wanted him to change who he was, to become a respectable man who obeyed his father’s every word, and followed every command given by his father’s God. Or what it was like to live with the knowledge that his father would disown him if he found something as harmless as a packet of cigarettes under his mattress. To not have that kind of love. To not even believe in it. But Abbas knew these things.

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.

A risk to own anything : a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around. Not enough shoes, cars, cigarettes. Too many people too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day.

Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. Ignoring the warning on the cigarette packet might not be the most flamboyant act of rebellion a man could allow himself, but at least it was one he could afford.

It is unfortunate that the pulling out of one phone can have such an effect on other people around. Sometimes I think it’s because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull out our phones together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we’re easily bored.

Computers can destroy people’s memory systems – because there will be no need. You can keep a small computer the size of a cigarette packet in your pocket: it contains everything that you will ever need to know. Now there is no need to have your own memory. Just push a button and the computer is ready to give you any information you need.

In cigarettes, we have pictures of blackened lungs on the packs. But packets of potato chips don’t bear the picture of an obese heart patient, right?

For a man, staying single in teenages is equivallent of smoking to two and a half packets of cigarettes.

When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.

I said that we should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant this as a joke; nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of Lucky Strike. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols who had twice stopped him at the pistol’s point and examined his papers. I shall not forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

But there is also my brain and it is gently, unobtrusively asking me questions that don’t require answers because the answers are already there: it won’t last; he’s just TOO perfect for me, TOO handsome, TOO sexy; I’m not the one for him, if such a person exists at all. Sooner or later it will come to an end because the feelings disappear, even the strongest ones. They are inexorably broken down by life’s worries and problems and the fears that come with them. But with Alex it will most likely happen sooner rather than later – he is just TOO seductive and virtually all women without exception look at him TOO greedily. When it’s all over, he’ll simply step over us and move on and I... I’ll be abandoned like an empty cigarette packet on a dirty pavement. I have no desire to fade away in the scorching sun, covered in dust and dripping wet with dirty rainwater.

She seemed to have eyes like a fly, with multiple sections that could see sideways and backwards, and into things that hadn’t even happened yet. Such as into Barry Hollis’s desk where he had a packet of cigarettes and a copy of Playboy.

At school Amar was valued for the very qualities that were looked down upon in his house. There he was not disrespectful but funny. There it was good that he was interested in English class, in the poems and stories his teachers assigned.As far as he was aware, none of his school friends knew what it was like to come home to a house that is quite the way his was, where everything was forbidden to them—loud music or talking back, wearing shirts with band logos printed on them. The father who yelled, a mother who looked out the window and spent the day praying or tending her garden. A family that wanted him to change who he was, to become a respectable man who obeyed his father’s every word, and followed every command given by his father’s God. Or what it was like to live with the knowledge that his father would disown him if he found something as harmless as a packet of cigarettes under his mattress. To not have that kind of love. To not even believe in it.

She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

I take it Hella is your road name? Or should I just stick to ‘cunt’?” He laughs, a smirk beaming from his mouth. “I like the sound of ‘cunt’ coming out of those sweet lips. Maybe you should stick to that.” He pulls out a packet of cigarettes, placing one in his mouth and watching me every two seconds. “Hella isn’t my road name. Had it since I was a kid. It was so people couldn’t kill me and sluts couldn’t bang down my door after having my dick lodged down their throat once.” He blew a cloud of smoke in my face.  “Well, I’ve had your dick in me, and I gotta tell you…” I stand, bending over the table and scanning his huge arms with a smile. “I’m a little disappointed,” I lie through a whisper.

4. Or else: Rough draft of a letter I think of you, often sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon (yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea) I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested) (...) Outside there's a bit of sunlight the cafe is nearly empty two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine I am thinking of you you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxfur collar, you're smiling, and remote (...)

F--- me," Malikov wheezes. "I gotta... quit smoking." Donnelly smiles over her shoulder despite herself. "Chances of me making out with you again will probably improve if you do." Malikov reaches into his envirosuit's outer pocket as he runs, fishes out a crumpled packet Tarannosaurus Rex™ cigarettes and sends it sailing down the stairwell. "Fly free, little buddies.

Around ten o'clock, we left for the train station, pressing upon the Wagners the little gifts we'd brought--chocolate and cigarettes, bars of soap, and packets of dried fruits--exchanging addresses and promising to write even though we knew we wouldn't. It was one of the great joys of travel, these fleeting exchanges and ephemeral friendships, the way people you met abroad would forever linger in your memories of a place.

Devices like iPhones and BlackBerries invite (demand!) constant use. They are like packets of cigarettes that ask us never to leave them alone or bottles of pills that seek to change our minds and punish us when we try to withdraw from them. We think cellphones are connecting us, but they are turning us into a society of rude, impatient, narrow-minded, stressed-out, aggressive, and isolated individuals. They invite reaction rather than reflection.

Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.

I remember standing against the bar in Budapest’s airport with a couple of workmates, some chaps from McLaren too, waiting for our homeward flight to be called after the ’92 race weekend. The chap behind the counter was doing the exact same thing: halving and squeezing oranges. Funny how these things spark memories. It was an exceedingly hot afternoon that day, and I remember seeing James Hunt walk through the door with Murray Walker. We were waiting for the same flight, a charter to London; I think pretty much the whole of the paddock’s British contingent was on it. Murray looked perfectly normal . . . like Murray really . . . open-necked shirt, briefcase, what have you; but James was wearing nothing but a pair of red shorts. He carried a ticket, a passport and a packet of cigarettes. That was it. There wasn’t even a pair of flip-flops to spoil the perfect minimalist look. The thing that really made the event stick in my mind, though, was that James was absolutely at ease with himself, perfectly comfortable. This was real for him, no stunt or affectation designed to impress or shock, this was genuine: James Hunt, former world champion driver, current commentator for the BBC; work done for the day . . . going home. Take me, leave me; do what you bloody well want, just don’t give me a hard time about your own petty hang-ups. He became a hero of mine that day. Sadly, his heart gave out the following summer and that was that. He was only forty-five. Mind you, he’d certainly packed a lot of living into those years.

The little sneak caught me one day, coming around the car when I was outside puffing away. “I was wondering what you were doing,” he said, spying me squatting behind the truck. He’d nailed me, but the look on his face made it seem as if our roles were reversed--he looked as if he were in shock, as if I’d just slapped him. When I went back inside, I found he’d taped signs to the walls: DON’T SMOKE! I laugh about it now, but not then. “Why are you so devastated that I’m smoking?” I asked when I found him. “Because. I already lost one parent. I don’t want to lose you, too.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m going to stop.” But of course it wasn’t nearly that easy. As horrible as I felt, I was deep into the habit. I would quit for a while--a day, an hour--then somehow a cigarette would find its way to my mouth. I continued to rationalize, continued to struggle--and Bubba continued to call me out. “I’m trying,” I told him. “I’m trying.” He’d come up and give me a hug--and smell the cigarette still on me. “Did you have one?” “Yes.” “Hmmmm…” Instant tears. “I’m trying, I’m trying.” One day I went out to the patio to take what turned out to be a super stressful call--and I started to smoke, almost unconsciously. In the middle of the conversation, Bubba came out and threw a paper airplane at me. What!!! My son scrambled back inside. I was furious, but the call was too important to cut short. Wait until I get you, mister! Just as I hung up, Bubba appeared at the window and pointed at the airplane at my feet. I opened it up and read his message. YOU SUCK AT TRYING. That hurt, not least of all because it was true. I tried harder. I switched to organic cigarettes--those can’t be that bad for you, right? They’re organic! Turns out organic tars and nicotine are still tars and nicotine. I quit for day, then started again. I resolved not to go to the store so I couldn’t be tempted…then found myself hunting through my jacket for an old packet, rifling around in my hiding places for a cigarette I’d forgotten. Was that a half-smoked butt I saw on the ground? Finally, I remembered one of the sayings SEALs live by: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Not exactly the conventional advice one uses to stop smoking, but the conventional advice had failed me. For some reason I took the words and tried applying them to my heartbeat, slowing my pulse as it ramped up. It was a kind of mini-meditation, meant to take the place of a cigarette. The mantra helped me take control. I focused on the thoughts that were making me panic, or at least getting my heart racing. Slow is smooth. Slow down, heart. Slow down--and don’t smoke. I worked on my breathing. Slow is smooth. Slow is smooth. And don’t smoke.

order a bottle of wine, drink a toast to his wife’s pregnancy, and forget all about Jackson for a few hours. Instead, he paid his bill and headed out. The warrant for Logjam was a month old and no dealer could stay out of sight much longer than that before his customers migrated to a new supplier. Logjam would have resurfaced by now. The first place he visited was a washout. So was the second. He moved on to a zydeco joint. It stank of flat beer and stale smoke. The customers paid him little heed as he nursed a Canadian Club and ginger at the bar. He hadn’t long to wait until he spotted who held the concession. The bartender handed three customers a complimentary book of matches each as he set down their drinks. Two of them already had cigarettes lit, their lighters squared neatly on top of their cigarette packets. Val called him over. “I’m looking for a friend of mine.” The man eyeballed him. “A guy like you has no friends.” “His name’s Logjam. Have you seen him recently?” The bartender wiped the zinc counter with a sponge cloth. “Never heard of him. Does he come in here?” Val set his shield on the bar. “Have you

From experience in Boulogne and Calais, Tennant had a good idea of the chaos he might encounter of an army – possibly even two armies – in full retreat. He and Ramsay hoped that the distinctive blue of a naval uniform would be able to assert some authority, when army officers and men were all dressed in khaki battledress. On the way across, his sailors were issued with revolvers, much to their surprise, and were told they were to shoot anyone who tried to jump the queues.  Tennant’s officers were sceptical and told him he needed some additional nomenclature. They decided he should have the letters SNO, for ‘Senior Naval Officer’, on his white helmet. There was no paint available, so he cut out the letters from the silver paper from a cigarette packet, and stuck them on with the pea soup he had just been served for lunch.

At the beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes a day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when there was no issue of tobacco at all. For the first time, in Spain, I saw something that you see every day in London—people picking up fag-ends.

of marbles. When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.

Once, in Belgium, Karl Burns had been given a load of Belgian francs to spend and given the impression it was an awful lot of money. Carroll and Smith, the terrible twosome, howled with laughter when the naive drummer returned 20 minutes later, exploding, ‘This won’t even buy me a fucking packet of cigarettes!

In This Darkness by Stewart Stafford A limo drove through mansion gates, Rock star John saw her wait again, Hysterically begging for autographs, The gates closed behind the limo. John said stop, and exited the car, "I'll sign it for you tomorrow, 100%," "No," she said, "sign tonight... now," He strode towards his home gates. He rummaged in his coat pockets, Ripping a cigarette packet to sign, He found a tiny pencil in his pants, Trailing breath vapour in the night. "I can't see you in this darkness," A chilling laugh from the fan's side, Three muzzle flashes, John died, Contorted on a bloody driveway. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Shame about all the rubbish. It always turns up, doesn’t it…” “Yes,” said Lu-Tze. “It’s part of the pattern.” “What? The old cigarette packet?” “Certainly. That invokes the element of air,” said Sweeper. “And the cat doings?” “To remind us that disharmony, like a cat, gets everywhere.

Going to a well-worn overcoat hanging on the back of the door, he took from the pocket a packet of cheap cigarettes and some matches.

Rummaging in his pocket, he can’t feel his packet of cigarettes. He snorts, shaking his head. "Would you like one of mine?" says a man’s voice behind him. Andrea turns around and a man with dark hair and a thin face stands before him with a silver cigarette case open. He has elegant sunglasses that cover his eyes like a headband. "You won’t find these in the store." His lips hint at a smile. "Key." "Dorian?" Andrea asks, a lump in his throat. He nods and his chin is tickled by a gray, linen scarf. "You can call me Ian," he says, putting one in his mouth. Andrea takes a cigarette. It’s white, just like Ian’s sweatshirt. "Thank you." He holds out the lighter with the flame already high. Andrea moves closer to light up and, feeling trapped, takes the first drag. "Andrea," Ian calls him by his name. "It’s a pleasure to meet you." He holds out his spotless, thin hand. "The pleasure is all mine, Ian." He shakes it firmly. "Are

Oh no?" he sneered, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one up. "Knowing what you're like, the slightest sign of a discarded cigarette butt and you would've been crawling around on your hands and knees trying to figure out how tall the smoker was, how old he was, what zodiac sign he was, whether he'd taken a crap that morning, and Christ knows what else.

The government ought to intervene in flag design the way they have in cigarette-packet design. Flags kill far more, and make the air around them far filthier. All flags ought to be blank white rectangles, with the name of the country printed in Helvetica in the centre at a strictly regulated size and weight.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory: hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad.

F--- me," Malikov wheezes. "I gotta... quit smoking." Donnelly smiles over her shoulder despite herself. "Chances of me making out with you again will probably improve if you do." Malikov reaches into his envirosuit's outer pocket as he runs, fishes out a crumpled packet Tarannosaurus Rex™ cigarettes and sends it sailing down the stairwell. "Fly free, little buddies." "Talk less. Run more.

For example, until the mid-1960s, airline flight attendants distributed free packets of cigarettes with after-meal coffee. In the late 1980s, U.S. airlines banned smoking from all domestic flights.

I’ve got to keep moving somewhere. I’ve written some of my best songs on the move, driving on a long journey, scribbling lyrics on cigarette packets while steering. I like that style,

Linda closed the door without answering. She searched the car again to ensure she hadn’t missed anything before the State Police arrived. A tattered highway atlas. Three empty packs of cigarettes, a lighter, a packet of ketchup, four stale French fries, and a corpse.

It never made much sense to me to see guys buying guns and going to the range with the excuse that it was for self-defense when the same guy is 100 pounds overweight, smoking two packets of cigarettes a day and eating a diet of fried food, pizzas and beer. He’s going to die from a self-inflicted heart attack or stroke before he ever ends up needing his gun for self-defense

He panned the streams for gold. Some winters he stayed with John Evans at Trevelin and swapped dirty nuggets for flour. He was a crack shot. He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packet from the police commissioner’s mouth; and had the habit of picking off ladies’ high-heels.

Ciao, Violetta.” The sound of his voice, low and almost caressing, is such a shock that for a moment I think I’ve hallucinated hearing it. But as I jerk my head back, I see his shoes, his jeans, and swiftly I swing my legs under me, scrabbling for a foothold in the squishy mud of the riverbank, digging in my toes, and stand up waist-high in the water. Luca has bent his long legs now, and is sitting down in front of me, halfway down the bank on a stone outcropping, so we’re almost level. I stare at him, still disbelieving. “It was you!” I blurt out, and then feel stupid. “Cosa?” He lifts his dark brows. I can see his face clearly in the moonlight, the pale skin, the perfect bone structure, the black lock of hair that falls over his forehead, inky-dark. “Before,” I say. “Up by the club. You were smoking.” He nods. “Which you think is a disgusting habit,” he observes, amusement in his voice. “Yes, I do,” I say firmly, glad of the way the conversation is going; ticking him off is much easier than…anything else. “It’s revolting. Schifoso,” I add, having learned the word in Italian. “Bene.” He pulls the packet from his jeans pocket, raises it to show me, and then, quite unexpectedly, releases it, his long fingers empty, the packet falling into the river beside me. “No more cigarettes,” he says. “Since you say they are schifoso.” “You’re stopping? Just like that?” I fish out the packet before it becomes so waterlogged it sinks, and put it on the grass. He shrugs. “Perchè no?” I swallow. “You shouldn’t just throw things in the water like that. It’s bad for the environment,” I say, sticking with the severe, ticked-off voice, as it makes me feel safe. If I lose this voice with him, I’m in much deeper, more dangerous waters than this pretty little river. “Mi scusi,” he says lightly, an apology with not a flicker of contrition in his voice. “You are good for me, Violetta. The only one who tells me when I do wrong.” When he calls me by the Italian version of my name, I can’t help it: I feel like I’m melting. Dissolving, helpless, gone.

He came back with an extra-large one-kilo pack of Haldiram’s bhujia. How is it legal to sell these unhealthy things? Or why don’t they at least come with a warning? Like those cigarette packets have pictures of people with cancer, maybe these can have pictures of super-fat uncles facing cardiac arrest or bedridden,

with dust and ash, a fast-food coffee cup was sitting in the centre console with eight cigarette buts dropped in it, and the passenger footwell was littered with burger wrappers and cigarette packets.  She could comment, but it wouldn’t make a difference.  He wheeled backwards into the middle of the underground car park and accelerated up the ramp. The scanner clocked his number plate and the barrier lifted. The engine whined and the Volvo thrust itself into the mild midday sun, the sounds of the city engulfing them.  They didn’t speak on the way over — both too engrossed in their own thoughts. Roper was no doubt planning his line of questioning for Grace. Jamie was thinking about Ollie. About how an eighteen-year-old kid goes from sixth-form to heroin in one fell swoop.  She still hadn’t spoken to his parents. Or to the doctor. She really needed to.

Soon the Pirate Captain was strolling through Hyde Park telling his crew all about life on the inside. ‘You have to survive on your wits, really. Especially a good-looking fellow like myself. There was a real risk I could have been traded around by my cell mate for a packet of cigarettes. And it’s important not to drop the soap. Though having said that, I’ll miss the camaraderie. Taking new prisoners under your wing, showing them the ropes, that kind of thing.’ ‘We’re very glad you’re free again,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘Yes. Freedom. Difficult to adjust to that.’ The Captain furrowed his brow and did his best thousand-yard stare. ‘I hope I haven’t become institutionalised.’ ‘I think it takes longer than half an hour to become institutionalised, Pirate Captain.

I suspect he knew how ill he was but was afraid to admit it, either to his physician or himself. He was already hospitalized by the time I returned home, would never leave that bed, and only briefly regained consciousness in the weeks that followed. It’s the strange gift that cancer gives before it finishes its work: a few days, or even just a couple of hours, during which the patient is offered clarity and a chance to say goodbye. My father spent some of this time drawing a map of the hospital and its surroundings on the back of a cigarette packet, the irony of plotting his escape with the aid of the instruments of his self-destruction entirely lost on him.