You're never alone with a Flickr

This attractive dummy appears on the pages of a little Flickr group I came across this morning. Nice isn't she?

The group is called Smooth Smoke Slogans and it specialises in good old fashioned cigarette adverts.

I used to love the look and feel of adverts as a young impressionable smoker. I can always recall to my mind an advert in Hampton Hill High Street for a packet of Carltons - a cool purple type of affair (as were the packets) and thought I would try and fit a packet into my extensive sampling programme. I didn't get round to it partly because I had half an idea that the lads at school might pick up on the fact that the packaging was a bit, hmmm, feminine. I also think that the unavailability of the brand in packets of ten was another off-putting factor. I didn't want to blow two weeks tobacco budget on an untested smoke despite that colour being so lush and enticing.

Who knows what impact buying some Carltons might have had on my future development? I might have been humiliated by my mates ("No thanks Fuller, I'd sooner wear high heels") and given up on the whole cool smoker act and gained an extra ten years of life. Alternatively it might have led to me discovering I did like wearing high heels as well. Though I confess I am wearing my partner's polka dot pyjama bottoms as I write this, that's about the limit of my cross-dressing. Honest.

More cigarettes presented similar problems for the adolescent male smoker. I always liked cigars and cheroots and More obviously looked cigar-like. You could just about get away with them for a few days before buckling down to some proper cigs again. But More Menthols? No way, no never no way.

Thanks to hier-houd-ik-van for his picture "Mary Long".

You can find a bit more cigarette nostaglia here.

smoking cigarette advertising flickr advertising hampton hill