Ashes To Ashes
‘APART from the binge sex and the binge vomiting, very little goes better with a bout of binge drinking than a night of binge smoking.
| Marie was a big fan of the new B&H 1000s |
The Express has seen a report by the European School Survey Project of Alcohol And Other Drugs (or ESSPAAOD – ”PISSED” in Slovakian) and found that 29% of British 15 and 16-year-old girls are binge drinking, compared to 26% of boys.
Even allowing for the effects of talking up your drinking to impress your mates, this is pretty interesting news, and gets more so when we learn that a decade ago the figures were, respectively, 20% of girls and 24% of boys.
This means that around a quarter of today’s youth will live to a ripe old age, fortified and pickled in ten parts hooch to six parts vodka. Hurrah!
But only if they smoke will they live to be as old as the Sun’s Marie Ellis, who has recently died of heart failure at the ripe old age of 105.
It is however unlikely that Marie, or her ghost, will appear on a Government-sponsored advert to tell how the half a million fags she smoked in her lifetime gave her the strength to carry on through two world wars and one Tony Blair – even if the tax she paid on them bankrolled the invasion of Iraq.
The perils of smoking have been made clear, but still Marie managed a long life – she even possessed the strength to clutch a packet of her favourite Benson & Hedges longevity sticks to her bosom as she lay in her coffin.
Staff and residents at the nursing home where Marie smouldered stood well back as she was cremated (surely, stamped out) to the tune of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and lay a floral tribute in the shape of a ciggie in her honour.
”We all remember Marie for smoking,” says Maria Kallis, a matron of Eaton Lodge, Westgate, Kent, ”so we are getting a concrete ashtray put in the garden as a memorial to her.”
And that’s just a lovely way to remember a woman who ”loved a drop of sherry” – a woman who binge lived…’
Posted: 15th, December 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
