The cigarette is dangling from her mouth at an angle of about 20 degrees to the horizontal. Her lip-sticked sexy lips fasten tightly around the end of the pleasure cylinder and it assumes the horizontal position as the lit end starts to glow. Her cheeks hollow and she’s concentrating on drawing the tar and nicotine laden smoke into her mouth. She loosens her oral grip on the cigarette, it droops a little, ceases to glow, and a gap opens up at the side of the mouth. The length of ash is slightly longer now.

There’s an intake of oxygen that she will mix with the smoke in her mouth and then she’ll pull that mixture down into her lungs where it will do its precious pleasure-creating work. After several seconds, maybe even five or six, smoke will issue from the side of her mouth or from her nostrils.

A few moments later the lips’ grip on the cigarette will tighten once more and it’ll bob up to the horizontal position and the whole process will begin again. It’s strangely quite beautiful to watch.

Perhaps quite a number of such cycles such will take place until eventually, the smoke stinging her eyes, or the work that she assigned to her hands is done, she’ll remove the cigarette from her mouth.

This sort of scenario could occur for a number of reasons, such as packing groceries in her car in a supermarket carpark, manoeuvring while driving, or even getting her child settled into his push-chair.

I don’t know why this sort of sightings is so memorable. It’s perhaps because the woman seems so utterly united with her cigarette that it’s part of her. Or perhaps it’s because she’s so needy for a cigarette that she’ll light one even when it’s awkward to smoke, or it’s in desperation just after a long period of enforced abstinence. Perhaps she started as a social smoker but now she must whether it’s a sociable activity or not.