Pipe dream

Woke up from an afternoon nap and heard this on Doc Martin (ITV):

"Why are smokers always surprised when they're ill? Why do they think they're going to be the lucky ones who live to be 100? Did you think you'd make it to 70?"

"I'm 75."

"80?"

"My mother smoked a pipe until she was 93."

"And then she died."

"No, she lost her pipe."

Or was I dreaming?

Comments

[Misty]

No, you weren’t. Those lines really are in the programme, and I think they illustrate exactly the anti-smoker mindset that a tight-lipped puritan like Doc Martin – superbly played by Martin Clunes – would adopt, in that, when confronted with the fact that a smoker has already “outlived” his own brainwashed expectations, he simply moves the goalposts in preference to admitting that maybe – just maybe – what he has been “informed” about is – err – simply incorrect.

It’s like the “delay factor” which has become the last refuge for anti-smokers in respect of the increasing number of cancer cases in spite of the decreasing number of smokers. This “delay factor” has gradually increased in length from, I recall, it taking “five years to reach the same low risk factor as a never-smoker,” to 10 years, to 20 to (most recently) something in the region of 50 years (vis-à-vis their response to the increasing number of women getting cancer now being due to their having smoked back in the 1960s and 70s)! The way things are going, pretty soon, the “delay factor” will become so long that by the time smokers are due to die from their past misdeeds, they’ll actually already have died from something else!