On pauses, intermissions and rhythms of ritual

In 1999, I made a film about smoking for my portfolio to gain a place on the Time-based Media (Film) course at The Surrey Institute of Art and Design. The film featured my colleagues from the smoking room at Kentish Town Job Centre. I asked them to speak about their lives as their cigarettes burnt down, and the smoke curled from their mouths. I distorted and slowed their speech, Beckett-style. It was, without a doubt, a bit shit, but it did the trick.

I knew, and that film confirmed it, that I had to get out of that job. Many of those colleagues were musicians,¹ writers, artists. Too beautiful, creative and fragile for the ruthless private sector, people wanting to do something else, but stuck in the endless cycle of paying bills…

In that job, I became slightly obsessed with the serial killer and necrophile Dennis Nilsen, who had worked there from ’82 until his arrest. If I had to go to the basement that held the archived case files, my colleagues would tease me about him having dragged bodies through the same halls. I don’t know why I became quite so obsessed with him (n.b. it was never in the “write to him in prison” way). It was never awe. It was proximity. The knowledge that he had once occupied the same architectural space. A kind of spatial haunting. He died in May 2018, and my obsession briefly started up again. And then a couple of nights back, I watched some of the documentary on Netflix.

But this isn’t a post about my obsession with Dennis Nilsen. This is a post about smoking because I’ve recently given up — which, like the picture above (smoking one of my last cigarettes, in my dressing gown at 7am with coffee²) has felt like a kind of disappearing, as my dopamine levels recalibrate.

My relationship with smoking has always been there, humming in the background. The poet, Charles Baudelaire, wrote of intoxication, ennui, and pleasure:

“You must always be drunk. That’s all there is — it’s the only question.
So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time that breaks your shoulders and bends you toward the earth, you must get drunk without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. But be drunk!”
— “Be Drunk” (1860)

I’ve never been a big boozer. But smoking I’ve always loved. All of 2024 and most of 2025, I smoked. I gave up 6 weeks ago, after catching some virus from hell. I’m still in the immediate throws of missing it, the flick, the inhale, the exhale, the choreography of self-possession, the pause before the next demand on me. The dopamine hit. The rhythm of ritual. But crucially, and I can’t stress this enough, the moment to yourself, (often in nature) that allows for a lapse in critical thinking.

David Hockney once said he smokes for his mental health, that when he steps back from the easel, a cigarette helps him think and see his art anew. I get that. I miss those little pauses, those moments suspended, the tiny monument to the fleeting next.

Call it romantic. Stupid. Unnecessary.

Call it disgusting. I think about that smoking room from 1999: the yellowing walls, the fingers, the teeth, the skin, everything it touched left slightly jaundiced.

Call it agency in a hyper-disciplined society. In other words, it’s going to kill you, but fuck it. And because it’s slow, you mistake the drag for reflection, as if pacing your own ruin makes it somehow more profound.

What I didn’t realise about giving up smoking, is that kicking the habit is one thing, but the dopamine drop is horrendous.

Anyway, maybe this isn’t about smoking. Maybe it’s an ode to the meditative pause taken during writing, those small, private intervals.

To take a break is to leave the main text and step into the margin, into a type of footnote, annotation or para-text. The cigarette break is like a commentary: a pause or act of refusal against the otherwise unbroken line of productivity. The smoke break opens a brief aperture; an alternative temporality, a counter-rhythm to the official discourse of work. The cigarette break is ephemeral and insistently material. So, having given up, I’m back inside the paragraph, no longer pausing and rarely taking any intermissions.

And I wonder how other people take breaks with their writing. Tea, coffee, going for a walk? Sure. What else?

Subscribers! what form do your pauses take? Which are the small ritualistic acts that let the day fall apart a little. What can I do to replace the smoke break?

I remember the odd client being star-struck over one of my colleagues, the punk musician Mark Perry, from Alternative TV.

1.

2. But truthfully, I just love the picture, even though smoking is emphatically NOT cool.