the corner office

We (finally) started watching Slow Horses. There's an opening scene where the camera lifts and pans over Jackson Lamb's desk. It's a mess, and as it pans, it moves over an overflowing ashtray, at which point I burst out laughing, and we had to go back and watch it again.

Not just any old ashtray - an ashtray made from a small solid rubber tyre, with the "ashtray" bit being a metal bowl fitted inside the rim. And I burst out laughing because I have one of those ashtrays myself, inherited (if I remember correctly) from my grandparents' flat, where it was probably some kitsch promotional thing my (by then non-smoking) grandfather had brought home from work and stuck in his study. I even used at times in my smoking days.

It's a small touch of authenticity and I don't think many people younger than my generation would have realised that those sorts of ashtrays ever existed. Beyond that, it's only if you'd ever used one of them that you'd have known that the metal bowl inside the tyre was actually quite small, so it didn't take much for the ashtray to overflow. I'd have to admit with some shame that I probably had my tyre ashtray equally overflowing a few times. Late nights, long sessions at the computer and all that. That was one reason why I didn't use it much.

This trip down memory lane also reminded me that I'd been reflectingly recently on the fact that late last year saw 20 years since I last smoked. I remember reading once that 20 years marked the point at which an ex-smoker was back at the same risk level as non-smokers for various cancers and health risks. Not all, and poor Leonard Nimoy's lungs never got that memo, sadly, but we take our comforts where we can.

They say ex-smokers are the worst anti-smokers, and it's true for me (not so much Ronwen - she says the day they announce a cure for cancer she's off to the corner shop to buy a pack). For me, I just can't imagine lighting up a cigarette again. The aversion is visceral. Nowadays I see or smell people smoking and my reaction is disgust; gross pfeh what are they thinking? I don't miss it and I don't like being around cigarette smoke. I don't know how non-smokers around me put up with it at the time. The world was different, I suppose. And maybe I was just great company.

Either way, I still have that old tyre ashtray, wrapped up in box of ornaments in a cupboard somewhere, alongside all the other ashtrays Ronwen and I accumulated over our younger lives. Maybe the odd one could be repurposed one day into a pot-pourri bowl in a summer cottage (lol), but for the most part, they'll probably just sit there as memorabilia from a time long-gone, and one day when Ronwen and I have both kicked the bucket or downsized, they'll end up in a charity shop where some enterprising set designer working on a "period" movie or TV series might snap one up as a set prop - if they even know what they're looking at.