LETTER TO MY ENGLISH DAUGHTER OR THE PERVERSIONS OF TOBACCO

Wednesday, December 15, 2021 DEAR HELEN: When Christmas arrives, I get morbid, full of Dickens's melancholic urges. Scrooge and Mr. Ebenester and their gang of raggedy men appear to me walking the London streets and saying: "Humbug". They are all nonsense. Life passes and heaven does not take pity on our pains and our prayers. It must be the nostalgia for Xmas pudding and those Christmas Eve with your mother at the grandparents' house in Hornchurch that will not return. My prayers are filled with compunction and repentance and I ask their forgiveness for the harm caused by my unconsciousness and incompetence as a father and as a husband. I wasn´t suitable to make you and mum happy. However, the borer or worm of conscience always returns at this time when the streets light up and at the door of the department stores, pascueros dressed in red and white beards ho ho ho appear at the doors of the English Court and the supermarkets; I wonder what the birth of the Savior will have to do with consumption, the venality of our society wanting to spend and buy. That's how it is. The waves of memories emerge. To ward off that pain I usually indulge in Bacchic debacles. Well, the experts say that the liquid element kills the penalties. Vinum bonum laetificat hominum (Ecclesiastes) I do not know if that biblical admonition that usually appeases the scruples of drunkards is true. Here I am smoking my pipe like so many years ago. My hookah is a companion of brought and I go to his help so that he illuminates the sources of my inspiration quite dry to the truth but my gossip bunker shack library or smoking room as well as oratory also provides me distance from the world and in this seclusion I live longing for love lost. I am a bird with a single nest, I had in my life only one love, your mother, the sweet Suzi with beautiful eyes and a London sense of humor. It is true that I met other women and I am married to one who gave me four beautiful children (I don't know if they came out of my factory but at least I paid for the baptism) and sometimes I reconsider and a voice tells me internally "you are a lucky uncle, you were loved by the most beautiful woman in the British Isles and you spoiled everything. " Well yes. There is a saying in Spanish that certifies it: "I lost what I gave you with whores and gangsters." Ah Christmas, what a sad solstice! They are the ides of December when the Romans lit lanterns throughout the empire to invoke Saturn the god of darkness to appease his anger and allow the return of clarity back in Epiphany on January 6. Meanwhile, in my bunker I inhale the smoke from my pipe at the age of 77. I became a pike from cigarettes watching Harold Wilson smoke that prime minister of the year you were born. In no way do I justify this damn tobacco leaf vice, but it helps me feel compassion for myself to bear with integrity the setbacks of destiny and perhaps to dream of a happy world. In truth I was not happy, rather a failed writer, romantic stubborn in caressing the sky with his hands. When I tried, a cloud would get in the way and I would fall into the abyss. Otherwise, I was very lucky because as your mother used to say "you always land on your feet". I reached the highest levels of journalism with my two correspondents to put the long teeth on my enemies. Let them be given with a song in their teeth. To smoke or not to smoke that is the question. Tobacco has become the terror of the millennium. Abstainers or smokers we all palmed it. Obsessed with putting aside such a scourge, they think they are very delusional, which is the entrance to the gates of immortality. They do not know that a fourth higher or a fourth lower here is not going to be anyone and that here is not going to be anyone to seed. They, on the other hand, I hit you hard, don't smoke, you die. Of course I'll die when my time comes. The inquisitors are back. The Spanish Inquisition comes from the hand of these enthusiasts for a life without smoke. What about carbon oxide pollution or pesticides? There is always an enemy to beat and the anti-smoking furies serve as a cover to hide other evils such as humbug, heartbreak, selfishness, the lack of solidarity in which we live. They want to burn us smokers alive. I am amused by such nonsense. Certainly, my father died of emphysema and your grandmother Mary Josheh Heagerty this is Mrs. Hugh was a victim of smoking but I believe that she died of grief because of the disgust of our marital failure and your grandfather Mr. Graham Hugh God have him in his kingdom He was a righteous man from Israel. He died of tobacco, although he was not an agent but a work-related illness. He worked in the city in a Finnish timber import company and the sawdust that the logs give off when they are cut unleashed the disease in his lungs. When he lived