Winnie Langley, we salute you:
Mrs Langley, who smoked her first cigarette aged eight, after the First World War broke out, according to the Croydon Guardian. She died on July 27, a month short of her 103rd birthday. A funeral service was held at Croydon Crematorium* on Tuesday afternoon.
Surviving family member Anne Gibbs told the Croydon Guardian: 'She loved Monopoly and cards and she always had ciggies on the back step. Auntie Winn got cancer when she was 88 but she bounced back. She had a pacemaker fitted when she was 98. She smoked until Christmas last year. She only gave up because she could not see the end of the match to light it.'
Despite battling cancer, Langley had stated that she was not worried about her health due to the fact that she didn't inhale the smoke.
* Thereby releasing 0.9 grams of mercury and 200 grams of chlorine into the atmosphere. I assume they whipped out the pacemaker first.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
"Britain's oldest smoker dies age 102"
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5 comments:
Good for Auntie Winn. 170,000 ciggies - wow! And as she didn't inhale, but for 'second-hand' smoke she may well have reached 150 years old!
Jean Calment, who is generally recognised as the world's oldest person ever smoked for ofver a hundred years until she was 116. Suspiciously she died within 6 years of giving up.....
At £7 for 20 she must have had a cracking pension.
And I wonder how old the youngest smoker to have died was.
I don't really care about people smoking - each to their own, I suppose. So long as they don't make the place unpleasant for everyone else. And as a non-smoker who used to travel on trains and buses and work in offices prior to the ban I can honestly say that it's improved the quality of life no end. Those who hark back to the 'good old days' (and there was much better about those days than now) would be struck by the fug and the filth everywhere.
It only takes one trip in my 20-a-day brother's car to realise how truly awful it was.
I've seen a number of things recently that suggest that giving up smoking is in fact dangerous. The death rate in the first year after giving up seems a lot higher than while smoking (can't find stats right now, due to work).
Things seem to calm down after the first year or so, and after than you're probably better off without smoking, but it does seem that giving up is potentially a dangerous decision...
Could it be that Winnie would still be around if she'd kept smoking a little longer?
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