RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31615, 28 February 1968, Page 18

RANDOM REMINDER

DEAD ENDS

Readers will be relieved to bear that we have solved the Mystery of the Trail of Cigarette Packets. For those who are not familiar with this heretofore unexplained phenomenon, it concerns the discovery by divers citizens in divers places of half-full packets of cigarettes, apparently thrown from fast-moving cars travelling along suburban streets. They have been found in gutters, hedges, flower beds and open gateways—always the same brand, and always strangely disfigured. To wit: each packet has been found twisted and crumpled as if the hand that flung it had first savagely strangled it to deprive it of its very life. These orphaned cigarettes have obviously been through a gruelling experience, and now that we have skilfully tracked down the culprit we can understand why.

It was not easy to force him out into the open. Our powers of detection were strained to the limit of enlightened criminology. Nothing was overlooked — finger - printing, house - to house inquiries, fiendish grilling of suspects and cunning interpretation of clues. Finally we broke the case. A friend admitted in the pub while talking about the cricket that he had recently thrown no fewer than 17 half-smoked packets of cigarettes out of his car window in a rage. Sure enough, it was nicoholism, one of the great social problems of our age, that led him to this desperate act He is a man temperate in his habits, but with a consuming addiction for cigarettes. Although he has given them up in the past, one incautious puff "hooked” him again, and now he was in the throes of “kicking his habit” once more.

(They’re full of jargon these nicoholics.) Our interrogation disclosed that he threw his cigarettes away whenever he felt sufficiently disgusted with himself, which was almost always, or to be exact, 17 times in the last fortnight Thanks to our professional counselling he has now apologised to the ciggarette manufacturers and terrorised suburbanites will be glad to hear that we are rehabilitating him. He is taking an anti-crav-ing tablet every four hours, smoking dummy cigarettes on Tuesdays, foul-tasting substitutes on Thursdays, and smoking himself sick every Sunday. If it works we plan to form Nicoholics anonymous. (If some of this material seems familiar, the explanation could be that half of it appeared by mistake yesterday, in the random tradition of this column.)