Pulse

by Julian Barnes

Maybe you can flirt in your own language, but you can’t do it in English, so we’re even.

“When I was giving up, it was the disapproval I hated more than anything. You’d ask if anyone minded, and they all said no, but you could sense them turning away and not breathing in. And either pitying you, which was patronising, or even kind of loathing you.”

“The absolutism of the recovering addict. Sorry about that, Baghdad.”

“We were in Brazil last year and the health warnings out there are apocalyptic. Colour pictures on the packet of hideous things—deformed babies, pickled lungs and stuff. And the warnings … None of that polite ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ stuff. Or ‘The surgeon general has determined.’ They tell you which bits will drop off. There was this guy who went into a shop and bought a packet of … I forget which brand. And he comes out, looks at the health warning, goes back in, hands the packet back and says, ‘These ones make you impotent. Can I have a packet that gives me cancer?’ ”

“Stigmatising smokers, taxing the fuck out of them, making them stand on street corners in the rain, instead of thanking them for being the nation’s cheap dates.”

We stayed, and talked some more, and decided that Obama would beat McCain, that the Conservatives were only temporarily indistinguishable from the Labour Party, that al-Qaida would certainly attack the 2012 Olympics, that in a few years Londoners would start getting nostalgic about bendy buses, that in a few decades vineyards would once again be planted along Hadrian’s Wall as in Roman times, and that, in all probability, for the rest of the life of the planet, some people somewhere would always be smoking, the lucky buggers.