| Smoking when Gambling | If you are smoking when you are playing online poker, then look at alternative ways to relax. By participating in a rakeback scheme for Poker, you can take a share of the house pot and see money returned. |
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| Smoking in cars and vehicles | Stop smoking in your car; smoking in your car can cause problems with selling it later on it's life. Car lease suppliers also have rules on vehicle wear and tear. Smoking in cars is dangerous and can cuase untold damage. Stop smoking in cars with our help. |
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| Smoking Holidays | Forget smoking with an activity holiday at Torquay Hotel TLH. An activity holiday can help take your mind off your smoking habit whilst you are looking to quit. Activies include Ballroom dancing, golf breaks and bowling. |
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| Smoking While Surfing = FAIL | Stopping smoking isn't eady. The hardest part is finding the willpower to MAKE yourself stop smoking, one way to do this is to overcome your habit by replacing it with a new one, a healthy one. My suggestion to you? Surfing, its an amazing sport and by next year you'll be able to do it all year round in massive indoor surfing centres that are opening around the country. Get yourself some surf gear in preparation.
Surf Clothes
Surf Clothing. |
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The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries (Smoking Diaries Volume 3) | 
 enlarge | Author: Simon Gray
Publisher: Granta Books
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £3.20
You Save: £4.79 (60%)
New (18) Used (4) from £3.19
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 4263
Media: Paperback
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 1847080723
EAN: 9781847080721
ASIN: 1847080723
Publication Date: November 1, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Life as it is lived - with humour and insight July 5, 2008
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
The Last Cigarette is the third volume of playwright Simon Gray's diaries which he began with The Smoking Diaries.back in 2004. Its not easy to categorise these books - I've chosen "diaries", for most of the time they record daily events over the course of a year or so, but also slip back to descriptions of events in the past. The free-form, conversational style gives the reader the impression that he's almost feel that you're listening to Simon Gray while chatting in a bar - which is not surprising because apparently he writes his diaries on an A4 pad, whenever he finds himself alone in a café, bar or hotel room.
The diaries contain a wide range of topics - descriptions of holidays in Greece and Barbados, the period when his play Butley was being produced on Broadway, stories about student days at Cambridge and early girlfriends, and underlying it all, Gray's love/hate relationship with cigarettes and his attempts to stop smoking. Needless to say, we never actually reach the "last cigarette" by the end of the book, despite countless struggles during earlier chapters.
What is so appealing about the books are their extreme, almost painful truthfulness. Gray makes no attempt to make himself seem a more attractive character. He describes his weaknesses and his failings with complete candour, and many readers will recognise their own behaviour in Gray's diaries.
This is not to say Gray's diaries are all introspective - far from it. There are many humerous sections, and I particularly enjoyed reading about the lost airline baggage, the Greek taxi-driver, the pest controller, and many other amusing episodes.
We also read of many of Gray's literary and theatrical friends, and it is moving to read of dinners with Harold Pinter and his wife Antonia Fraser during Pinter's illnesses. Gray gives many insights into Pinter's character, particulary his rages, which contrast so greatly with his general gentleness and tenderness. I think many of Gray's personal reminiscences of Pinter would provide important material for future biographers.
A final section of the book is set in Broadway, where Gray's play "Butley" was being revived, forty years after he wrote it. We read of a telephone call Gray receives from the producer while on holiday in Greece, asking if Gray could re-write the final scene in order to accommodate the deficiencies of one of the actors, who is having difficulty in mastering the correct English tone to his part. Gray knows in his gut that the real solution is to sack the deficient actor, but everyone on the cast speaks so warmly of him that he goes along with the re-write. This proves to be far more difficult than expected: by changing one line, you affect others, and by changing one act, you have to make sure that earlier acts are consistent with it, and so on. The re-write is typed on a tiny hand-held Blackberry in an hotel bed-room, and Gray rapidly sees that his initial compliance with the director's wishes in not insisting that the actor be fired is escalating out of control.
I find these "Smoking Diaries" beguiling, mostly because of their candour. The books almost give the reader permission to be "real". I seriously doubt that Gray had any outcome like this in mind when he wrote them, but by the end of each volume you might feel that you have felt that one other person at least messes up in the same way as you.
As good as Jeff Barnard June 8, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
There is something similar about the Simon Gray diaries and Jeff Bernard's old Low Life column but this is if anything even more readable and it would be hard not to empathise with Gray. I love his observations and frank turn of phrase. His best installment yet. Hard not to love
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