Here is a picture of a happy-go-lucky homeless urchin on a Madrid street corner. See how sophisticated and cool he looks.

Now look again.

Yes. He is cool and sophisticated because he is smoking a cigarette.

An Esample to Us All

Sadly, this sight is being becoming increasingly rare in Spain. Gone are the day when a young boy is undergo that most manly rite of passage, sitting on his father’s knee and lighting up his first cigarette, his other hand around his sippy cup of brandy. And so too will disappear the filthy cancer-riddle shoeless ragamuffin from the ancient streets of lovely pissing Dublin if the faceless and nameless bureaucrats (especially Simon O’Farrell of Dundalk) in the Customs and Exercise Office have their way. Only last week, I see, these nincompetents are manage to intercept a perfectly innocent ship carrying 140 billion free cigarettes destined for the nation’s kids, enough to keep them in nicotine for an entire weekend, by my rough calculation. Officers mount on board and arrest the sailors, who they later release, by the way, but confiscate all the cigarettes which they then smoke craftily in the staff room at lunchtime: The newspaper is report that the brands of fags stolen were named Palace, Chelsea, United, Arsenal and Scunthorpe, the last of which is specially popular with adolescent schoolboys.

In addition to this downclamping, the Irish government has also bought an X-ray machine from China to examine any other cigarette shipments.   The machine has cost €1.48 million and will probably arrive from China on the same ship as more smuggled cigarettes. I am not entirely sure what the Customs and Exercise are especting to find inside the cigarettes besides tobacco, mind you. Cigarettes are, notoriously, thin and narrow objects and made with paper, so why the government is going to so much trouble to scan them with X-rays when they can just smoke them is beyond me. Their time, surely, would be better spent X-raying cigars, which are at least a bit fatter;  you might possibly be able to smuggle an esotic animal inside, such as a chihuahua, a parakeet, a gomby, or a slut. An X-ray machine, frankly, is strike me as a waist of taxpayers’ money, especially at a time like this when the Department of Finance is complaining about not having enough money. I only hope they remember to collect the import tax on the X-ray machine, but I don’t have high holpes.   Instead, the idiot TDs are focusing on the fact that the fine for dealing in contraband cigarettes is a “mere” €423, as if smokers have any more money to spend on fags with the ridiculously high duty already put on them. THAT is the real crime in all this.  No wonder people resort to smuggling.

Once upon a time, smoking the cigarettes was play an important social role among people, a way of bonding them to one another when they are complete strangers. “Hello, pretty niña,” you could say to any little girl on a Madrid street corner, “Do you have any cigarettes on you? I’m gasping, as you can tell by my heavy breath.” Similarly, the urchin in the picture above would have been able, once upon a time, to break down the generation gap with his elders, mitching a fag off his father or his grandfather, if they were still alive. Now, however, he is reduce to surreptitiously rooting through his father’s pockets for change because he cannot get together enough money of his own through begging, gambling, or pimping to buy estortionately priced cigarettes. This sad state of affairs breeds mistrust between parents and children, doctors and nurses, police and thieves, Flanagan and Allen, with the result that children are now have to get their cigarettes in illicit tab houses, where it is entirely possible that the cigarettes have been tampered with or “cut” with unknown ingredients such as cannabis, Oxo, or dog poo. They don’t know what they are smurking in such places. Each time they are put a tab to their lips, is like Russian roulette without the gun or the bullet.

Children will not stop smoking ever, of course, because cigarettes are a naturally occurring vitamin that the body needs and which it will crave if it is not getting it regularly, a bit like absolution.  Of course, by keeping cigarette smuggling illegal, idiot politicians are only adding to the glamour of the Geordie tab house and also making it more difficult to either control or tax the smugglers.  How unfortunate, you might say to yourself, if you are a naive moron, but the reality is that they do it deliberately, with Alice Aforethought; their goal is to undermine our traditional indigent Spanish culture as part of their plan to construct the bland, culture-free, pan-European bureaucratic superstate so desired by our Illuminati rulers in their quest for total control over all our lives. If the Eurocrats have their way, we will we all be on our knees before them, sucking the feeble juice from their Euro-regulation carrots, instead of proudly lying in our hospital beds smoking life-enhancing fags.

So, remember, every time you cough up brown or yellow phlegm, you are sticking it to the Illuminati.   And ignore the lies of the bed-wetting liberal nanny superstate lackeys when they say that smoking is bad for you. Is total rubbish.  Smoke will do you no harm at all.  It isn’t even a solid!

I think.