Despite consuming many tobacco plants over the past 25 years I have never actually seen one.
That was until late last year at a Hawke's Bay garden centre where among the veges were tobacco plants.
And they were legal. Imagine my delight.
And if there was one plant that loved the sunny-rainy humidweather we've had in Hawke's Bay this summer it was my Virginia Blend tobacco plants (pictured) growing near the courgettes and watermelons.
They are now ready for harvest and hanging to dry in the garage, but of course the problem is that in the next stage of the process after you've apparently marinated the leaves in some Kentucky Bourbon is to roll it up and smoke it. And I am a non-smoker. Well apart from the occasional one here and there such as in a queue at the Sting Mission Concert listening to another smoker complain about queues, during the early days of the Christchurch earthquake and in various commando positions in random gardens on the lookout for the smoking police.
I was in the supermarket pondering whether to buy a pack of smokes when one young staff lady came up to me at the checkout and said "Are you that guy in the paper who gave up smoking?"
"Are you still not smoking?", she asked like so many before her.
Thank you to the many who have sent best wishes and hopes to me to remain smokefree. It has helped.
It's not easy being a recovering nicotine addict. Just look at Charlie Sheen. He proclaims on television to have miraculously given up all his vices overnight such as drugs and alcohol as he blows smoke in the interviewers face and describes himself a "winner." Smoking was now his only vice, he said.
You would have thought Charlie Sheen would have found it harder to quit all that other stuff that gave him a buzzy high than cigarettes, but then nicotine is supposedly more addictive than heroin.
My favourite reason for not smoking is the savings, but still I wonder what "Peter Fowler's Organic Kentucky Bourbon Virginia Tobacco Blend" would taste like without the proverbial few hundred toxic chemical additives.
