My girlfriend’s six-year-old has been able to read for a while now, but is only just starting to use the skill to decipher the quotidian messages all around the place that aren’t just words in reading books. ‘“Why’s that sign say Lewes 4?”’, and that sort of thing.
A few mornings ago she woke us up in tears, having found an empty cigarette packet I’d left on the coffee table downstairs. She’s long been attempting to police her mother’s smoking (‘it’s bad for you mum; it’s expensive’); but she just didn’t realise that it could be so bad.
“Mummy, mummy. Smoking kills,” she wailed. “It says it on the packet. It kills. Smoking kills. You’ll die.”
Funny, that. I see the message, or similar ones of varying degrees of impact, every day, when I grope into the packet for another fag; but of course, it has no more effect that the rather tamer version of my youth: ‘government health warning: smoking can seriously damage your health’.
I’ve heard rumours that these warnings will get more and more (photo)graphic: soon we smokers will train ourselves to ignore full-coloured pictures of other, dead smokers’ lungs, too. But by then, it will probably become too late, one way or another, to make any difference.
You see, the warnings might have had no effect on me. But the way I saw this one filtered through the cold logic of a six-year old, made me think again. And again, and again. ‘Smoking kills, mummy. It says it on the packet.’ It does, as well. She’s right. It kills, and it’ll kill me, if something else doesn’t get me first. Maybe it’s time to give up again. After the holidays, of course.