ABSTRACT

I grew up with smoking; it just seemed to be life back then in the 1960s and 1970s. It was all around me; my clothes stank of it. Both of my parents smoked, and on Saturday nights the smoke hung like a low cloud in our front room. My father would be down in Paddy’s Bar at the bottom of Barginnis Street, and my mother, my Aunt Agnes and a few close friends sat with their sherry, port and vodka in our front room, and had a wee fag. The public bar was for the men in those days; the women and their wee drink were largely confined to the house on a Saturday night. They would sip at their drinks in the front room in front of the telly with the sound turned down, 77 Sunset Strip, and silenced images of glamorous Los Angeles, and they would pass the fags round, and maybe dream a little of Stu Bailey and Jeff Spencer, the private investigators from the show.