Psychogeography

Madame Jacquard

James Fox doesn’t so much smoke cigarettes as allude to the possibility of them being smoked. The fiery treat is sparked, two or three deep inspirations ensue, then the white trunk is fiercely coiled in the elephant’s graveyard of the ashtray. Having observed James smoke for some time now I’ve been driven to consider anew how for the nicotine addict the act defines both time and space. One of the first things you notice when you give up cigarettes is how your previously linear narrative is translated into a series of perplexing jump-cuts. Just as journeys are no longer measured by the number you smoke — home to Tube, one; car to work, three — so the whole day loses its rudder and heels about hopelessly on the choppy surface of the era.

I suspect that James’s manner of smoking has evolved over decades of global journalistic assignments. His is the prescient puffing of a man about to be airlifted out of Kigali shortly before the machetes begin to swish; his is the stolen suck which precedes the long walk down the air-conditioned corridor of power. By smoking an untipped Gitane in less than three minutes James ensures that his space-time continuum is rigidly defined, a blue-brown set that can be erected and then struck within seconds. But at what cost? While I’ve always maintained that to seek out cut-price tobacco for myself with any seriousness is a dangerous admission (if I have to economise, shouldn’t I give up?), what’s to prevent me helping James to budget more wisely?

In Britain the Exchequer ensures that James’s preferred brand sets him back nearly twice as much as it would in its native France. I resolve to drive James to Calais to stock up; after all there’s a certain satisfaction in joining the great exodus to avoid duty, especially if experienced vicariously. Hundreds of thousands of Britons take the cross-Channel ferry to buy cheap booze and fags in France (and, since the French have hoiked their own tax, in Belgium); just as Finnish hordes take the train to Russia to buy vodka, and Norwegians — I am reliably informed — troll across to Sweden for cut-price sweeties. Doubtless perplexed archaeologists in the far future, discovering domestic middens of far-flung packaging, will hypothesise that the turn of the third millennium saw huge migrations of European peoples, each of them bringing their own distinctive material culture.

Rolling off the ferry in the afternoon darkness of mid-winter, James and I are sucked along as if I were piloting a spacecraft caught by a tracker beam. We bump over tram tracks and cobbles into the heart of Calais, skirt the Gothic asteroid of the Mairie and eventually dock in a busy thoroughfare. The shop fronts cosily glow; the good burghers of Calais, far from being enchained, are bustling about. At second-storey level we can see at least two of those distinctive elongated diamond-shaped signs which advertise the presence of a tabac.

In France the production, packaging and sale of tobacco is regulated by SEAT, the government monopoly, so these tabacs are as far from the British fag shop as is imaginable. In place of a Perspex rack offering a few tawdry filtered brands — with names like ‘Hanover’ and ‘Plantagenet’ — you’re presented with a startling array of tobacco-as-confectionery, displayed on glass shelves, while cabinets contain pipes, lighters and other fumilanary implements. And this is only the window dressing, because every tabac is attached to a vast storehouse, within which are entombed whole divisions of cigarettes, those suicidal infantrymen of the war against humanity.

Such an emporium was the Tabac Jacquard, and I saw it intoxicate poor James. At my suggestion he bought enough Gitanes to make the trip feel worthwhile. Worthwhile financially — he saved £300 — but worthwhile spatio-temporally as well, because with four thousand cigarettes on board he had in an important way mapped out the course of the next five months. No more late-night pilgrimages to one tobacconist that sells his brand, no more unpleasant fermatas as the white metronomes stop ticking. As he made the calculations with La Divina Nicotina — who appeared to me as a dowdy Frenchwoman of a certain age — a faint flush crept into James’s normally saturnine features.

When we regained the street James had two large carrier bags full of Gitanes and a sloppy grin on his face. He enthused over the gentility, the polish of the woman who he’d dubbed ‘Madame Jacquard’. He fantasised about seducing her away from her husband and settling down in Calais with a little tabac of his own. A week later in London I chanced to look at the receipt for my own modest purchase at the Tabac Jacquard and discovered why it was so called: it’s on the Rue Jacquard. But I haven’t had the heart to ruin James’s fictive relationship with Madame Jacquard. Not yet anyway.