Smoky beauty of the old Gitanes gypsy

Mary Kenny’s sneaking admiration for David Hockney’s filthy habit

Though I quit smoking many years ago, I can’t help giving a small cheer for David Hockney, who not only stubbornly continues to smoke, but regards the cigarette habit almost as a civil right in a free society. He even maintains, perhaps implausibly, that smoking prevents COVID-19 and has helped his health, since he’s in fine fettle at the age of 83.

Mr Hockney is understandably dismayed, on aesthetic grounds alone, that the French have altered the romantic Gypsy figure on the front of a packet of Gitanes to an image of an afflicted old crone. Pictures of famous smokers such as Jean-paul Sartre have also been airbrushed to remove the ciggie.

Smoking certainly can cause ill-health but it isn’t always to blame for everything. When I developed a pulmonary condition – diagnosed as bronchiectasis – in 2011, it was automatically seen as a punishment for my previous fag habit. A subsequent diagnosis indicated that it was more likely to have been caused by lung damage as a child, when I had a serious pneumonia.

If I ever again cross the Channel to Normandy – where Hockney dwells – I may smoke just one Gitane in his honour.

Imperial or metric? The cultural war between the two has never been resolved, Brexit or no Brexit. But during the spring, we were so insistently subjected to the two-metre distancing rule that we all became more familiar with metric measurement.

With younger people, metres had won the measuring war anyway. Still, it’s noticeable that imperial and metric can mix and match in this country. The metric system may be used for official announcements, but heights and weights are still colloquially given in imperial. When Boris Johnson was ill, we were told he was 17½ stone, and five foot nine inches tall.

At birth, a baby’s weight is given in kilograms, as are adults’ weights in medical tests. But popular culture still tells us that the singer Adele lost over seven stone, rather than 44.452 kilos. British dieters are attached to measuring their losses in stones.

Weather reporters officially announce temperatures in Celsius, but the popular press still describes a summer heatwave as being ‘in the 90s’. A Fahrenheit reading sounds more dramatic, even though both measures are usually given in the text.

The world – even America, in some fields now – has been progressively going metric, but I quite like the British muddle of retaining elements of the imperial. It has so much more resonance in habits of speech and tradition. ‘Going for a pint’ is handier than ‘going for 0.568261 litres’. The departed are more poetically buried ‘six feet under’ than ‘1.8288 metres down’. It’s nice that the racing fraternity still uses its ancient furlongs (of which we learned that eight constitute a mile). And The Oldie still sticks to good old imperial.

In the world of precision engineering, exactitude is vital, but in the human sphere an element of fluidity is endearing. Feet and inches were based on the human body, and even the French still use the same word for ‘inch’ as for ‘thumb’ – une pouce. ‘No’ can still be expressed as ‘not an inch’.

A cultural map of Europe has been published on social media, detailing the most famous person associated with each country.

Some are predictable – Shakespeare for Britain, Van Gogh for the Netherlands, Vlad the Impaler for Romania and Sibelius for Finland. Austria gets Freud and Hitler, Spain Picasso, France Napoleon and Rousseau, and Ireland has Oscar Wilde (not St Patrick). Germany gets Immanuel Kant, Sweden Carl Linnaeus, the botanist, and Belgium gets – Charlemagne. Who knew the Holy Roman Emperor was a Belgian? Good pub-quiz question!

Dublin is bidding farewell to one of its oldest cafés, Bewley’s in Grafton Street – closing because the rent is too high and the revenues are insufficient. Bewley’s Oriental Cafés, founded in 1840, were cheap and Bohemian, offering a heavenly aroma of roasting coffee for students and writers from James Joyce to Maeve Binchy. In 1928, the Grafton Street Bewley’s installed six stunning stainedglass windows, painted by artist Harry Clarke, portraying multicoloured birds, butterflies and sea creatures.

The Bewleys were a Quaker family who produced both philanthropists and eccentrics. The evangelising mission of the Society of Friends was to replace the intoxicating tavern with the sober coffee house.

Everyone, local or visiting, had a Bewley’s story. My elder brother was taken there as a little boy by our 50-ish father. My brother began whingeing about his ice-cream sundae, which occasioned a stern admonishment from the neatly liveried Dublin waitress. ‘Aren’t you the bold boy, cryin’ about the nice ice cream your grandfather bought you?’ Pa was amused, but it rather illuminates the old precept that it can be tactless to presume upon the details of a kinship.