ImagesBrighton pictures of the week 25-10-2004

IMAGESBRIGHTON photography by david gray
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The evil weed and its addicts are subject to ever-increasing restrictions and vilification. Local councils are preparing to ban smoking in public places. The government, despite the billions it earns from tobacco duty, spends huge amounts on advertising to scare people off the habit. But there have always been both condemnations of smoking and deep contradictions in attitudes towards it. Young people are still buying cigarettes, even though they know they are harmful and also now very expensive. Four hundred years ago, the first King James was so against the newly imported habit that he wrote a diatribe against it. Smoking, in his view, was "A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless". Now there's a health warning with style.

Time for a cigar after a wedding in London in July 2000 (image 1657-1)

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