My boyfriend has given up smoking. It’s his decision, though I suspect I helped. My favourite tactic was to summon up the image of our future children, their small faces with their large eyes – green like his, but red from the fumes – their tiny lips pursed in a cough. Or I’d describe myself: sullen and ashen, older now, but not by much, a solitary tear falling over the man lost to cigarettes. “Stop it!” he’d shout, the Sad Violin Music (This Will Make You Cry) YouTube playlist in the background.
We joke that he’s given up smoking so we can spend more of our lives together, yet he is so irritable that I’m less keen to. But really he’s given up because we’re agreed that life is best at maximum length. Where there is life there are options, and more of those are always better.
This conclusion is relatively new. It’s not that I believed differently before, but I hadn’t really thought about life or death, fretting more about the present – specifically whether everyone in it likes me – or living by my teenage live-fast-die-young sensibility, without any sense of irony that the generation who coined that phrase were now old.
My mother says my opinion may change again; that while I sit here in good health with youth on my side, I cannot fully comprehend the pain of an ailing body or mind. Perhaps she is right. But I read that babies born this year have a 50% chance of reaching 105 (105!) and I cannot help but enthuse. This once impossible prize – a century-long life – is no longer so. I like to imagine myself at 100, fat and wise, beaming about the letter I’ve received from the Queen, or, as it will be then, my text from King William. It’s an irresistible fantasy.
My boyfriend and I worked it out, and though we weren’t born this year, our chances of getting close must be pretty good. True, it was back-of-a-fag-packet maths, but it was enough to make that fag packet his last.
