here i am, not quite dying

hello there

my wish was to commence this with a greeting in belgian. the reason for this shall make sense as we go, if you keep reading, look you see. alas, the more widely used variant of dutch flemish translated as "hallo daar" and that just didn't seem appropriate.  

few, if any, will believe this, but i did not intend to write quite so many bits on cigarettes here as i apparently have done over the last few months. indeed it is so that smoking is not clever, quite likely as bad for you as they make out, don't start, quit, etc. leaving that aside, i do indeed smoke (sorry), and when some new (to me) cigarettes come along, well, what else would i write of? 

in this instance, i had an ambassadorial like (or esque) visitor off of that there belgium recently. they were so kind as to enquire as to if there was any item of belgian provenance that they could bring over me, and i said yes, very much so, some of them far (or rather considerably) more better and reasonable priced cigarettes what they have over there. 

and so it was that i got to experience, or try (or if you will smoke) some cigarettes called Next, or to be specific Next Original, as you can see in the above image. not sure if they are specific (or even unique) to belgium, but so far as i am aware it's a brand i had not heard of before. yes, probably, being presented with (or facing) some new cigarettes should likely have prompted me to quit instead, but no.

how are they? really, really good. on lighting one up, the first one (at least), i was rather taken by the full, rich sense of a smack they gave me. perhaps they are allowed to use all sorts of smart stuff in the making of them over there, or maybe they use a different (likely better) blend of tobacco. whatever is behind the improved taste, my goodness it works.

pictured above is some warning that i cannot understand, along with the price. yes, indeed, these cost a mere €7.50, which is around £6.50 in actual, proper, real money. this translates (at the moment) as roughly half the cost of legally purchased cigarettes here in the UK. cheers for that. soon these shall seem even cheaper, for our recently elected, demented, train driver loving government shall no doubt quite soon push the taxes up even higher. as they have already set out an ambitious plan to kill as many of the disabled, the elderly and children as they possibly can this winter i do wonder why they don't encourage smoking too, since death is what they patently do. 

just a quick throwback to the last thing i wrote on cigarettes in case you missed it, or have some interest in such things. once again, for those who berate all things "brexit", pretty much  all Cameron and his cronies needed to do was to make an unbreakable pledge to reduce the price of cigarettes to the same as one finds across the EU and he would have likely bribed enough of us to vote for what he wanted. no, he elected to simply threaten us instead. 

obviously i cannot disclose too much about why, exactly, i held a meeting with a (kind of) ambassador from belgium, but no harm can come from sharing the official press release picture. more of a "G2" sort of meeting rather than a full tilt "G7" one, i suppose, but note this does not mean that i presently recognise belgium as an actual, proper country. 

to tie in with all that "Brexit" and "EU" business, a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one was to see familiar warning images on the packets of Next cigarettes. some of you shall recall that, at the absolute height of their pettiness, the EU declared it "illegal" for the UK to use their cigarette warning pictures after "Brexit" was complete, with a tacit threat of war if we continued to use them. more on this subject can be found here, and overall i suppose it's nice we declined to fight to use them. 

indeed it may very well be so that i do go to belgium, irrespective of whether it's a proper country or not. were it so that i was to go then i would probably expect to be purchasing a few more of these cigarettes, what with them being very pleasing and sensibly priced. likely i shall do other things whilst there, but that's not important right now. 

so far as i am aware it shall be just the regular, (ahem) independently procured cigarettes that i shall be using for the remainder of the year that is 2024. unless something like death happens, or i consider it a good idea to quit. one is just as likely or plausible as much as the other. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!