I’m in Trisha’s in Soho again, perched on a stool in the tiny basement-level smoking area with two dozen people crammed in around me. My friend is an hour late but it’s the sort of place where you can turn up and talk to strangers, provided you have a cigarette in your hand.

Smoking areas are one of the last, precious designated arenas where it’s acceptable to approach someone you don’t know and strike up a conversation. In the smoking area outside the French, where the windows are open and you almost feel like you’re smoking inside, two girls lustily eye my cigarette packet and I offer them one and they compliment my hair—everyone is happy. Outside Gerry’s, where we go once everywhere else is shut, I get a chance to talk to the cute guy I was too nervous to speak to at the bar. Or outside the Colony Room, as the waitress from the restaurant upstairs pleads for us to leave, we share cigarettes with Soho old-timers—a jazz singer, a curmudgeonly writer, a silent man in a cowboy hat—and tag along to the Groucho, where an actress procures me a Vogue and I gush at her in gratitude.

Smoking is essential social technology: without this we would be lost, desperate, hanging around like loners. What conversation starters would we use if we couldn’t ask for a light? ‘I love your shoes, where did you get them?’ or worse, ‘What do you do?’ 

Camels cost £20 in Britain now so my packets have Greek or Italian or French written on them and I get to talk to strangers about Joan of Arc in Reims or Santa Rosalia in Palermo or Byron’s house near the sea in Metaxata. A whole horizon of conversation opened by a pack of cigarettes. You can talk to someone for half an hour without knowing their profession.

My secret is that I’m really very shy and socially anxious. People have called me intimidating, but this is a disguise I’m only able to uphold by smoking. I use cigarettes to dip outside when I feel overwhelmed. Without them, I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands. It’s not the cigarette that calms me but the whole ritual—the familiar talisman between my fingers, the little pink Bic lighter, deep breaths, falling easily into a conversation with some other secretly nervous person standing outside by themselves.

I used to live above a café where people would sit outside all day and smoke. There was a painter there, homeless but proud about it, and he’d give me packets of cigarettes in exchange for doing his laundry. It was a real community—I went there every day and knew everyone, got free coffee, did favours and received them in return. I made friends by sitting outside smoking, whether in the day or by night when there was live music. These were people I’d never have had occasion to meet or speak to otherwise.

Though cigarettes are a modern accessory, they give us access to an older social vocabulary, one based on ritual, gift-giving and hospitality. They even permit a small barter economy in the form of illicit baccy brought back from abroad and traded between friends and neighbours. Giving someone a cigarette is a gesture of respect which immediately forms a relationship between you, in the same manner as a medieval delegation bearing gifts or a new friend showing up to a dinner party with a bottle of wine. These are very old patterns of social behaviour, not yet subsumed by the logic of the market. If someone comes up to you and asks to buy a cigarette, there’s a little rush of joy in saying ‘you can have one’ and dismissing the suggestion of a monetary transaction out of hand. 

Social life has become more heavily regulated, organised and digitised than ever before. As dating apps have moved from the last resort of the socially inept to the primary means of making romantic connections, we’re unaccustomed to real life romantic approaches. In smoking areas, you can still flirt with strangers—holding a cigarette loosely between your fingers, bringing it to your lips, tilting your head away to blow smoke over their shoulder. Banning these places is part of a wider effort to bring every area of social life under control—if flirting can be profitable, there’s an incentive to disallow the avenues where it’s still free. 

After news broke recently that David Lynch had emphysema, he posted ‘I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco—the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them—but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.’ ‘Lighting cigarettes on fire’, I repeated reverently to an American with a vape in the crowded forecourt outside a private view, where everyone was smoking. ‘You get it,’ nodded a man named Gideon whom I’d met in the Trisha’s smoking area. We have much less to do with fire than once we had. There’s rarely cause to ignite anything. The people who say that smoking and vaping are interchangeable miss this point. Holding fire and smoke in your hand has an elemental appeal that a piece of plastic could never imitate. Smoking, like electricity, features so heavily in Lynch’s films because it’s a sort of magic—the conjuring of flame, the transforming process of fire, a means of enchantment.

At university, I met many people like Keir Starmer—young people with pursed lips far too sensible to smoke. When my college introduced a rule restricting smoking to four designated areas of the site, they supported it, even seeing no problem with the suggestion that you should go outside onto the road. I kicked up a fuss and made some specious argument about how it was unsafe to banish smokers to the streets at night when they were full of drunks who might harass us. This is the only argument that worked, one based on safety. 

Safety is the operative word for these people, who want nothing more than the whole of society running predictably along well-oiled grooves, conversation about sensible topics like what you do for work. No adventure, no risk. Meeting a similarly sensible partner by use of an algorithm that matches you based on shared political views and a preference for vegetarian Ottolenghi recipes. The world they want has no lipstick-stained shared cigarette, no glint in the eye at 3am. Only a hectoring voice saying ‘you can’t smoke here’—forever​​.