It’s an enduring image of our times: fallen angel Charlotte Church staggering out of a club, stolen bottle of WKD poking out of her handbag and four or five cigarettes rammed into her bleary red face.
Well, get used to not seeing that again. Because Charlotte Church has decided to give up smoking for good. We’d have thought that this would affect her powers negatively, like He-Man deciding not to ride Battle Cat around all the time, but it seems as if Charlotte’s primary capability – that of being a little bit annoying – is just as intact as ever.
Yesterday was national No Smoking Day – a day when millions of
people around the country make all kinds of rubbish excuses about why
they still need to light up – and what better role-model to enforce the
smokeless day than shrieking Welsh girl Charlotte Church (CDs)?
But wait, you ask, isn’t Charlotte Church, like, completely addicted
to smoking fags? The sheer amount of footage of Charlotte sucking up
cigarettes in one go like a genetically modified frog seems to attest
to that. You’re wrong, though; Charlotte Church quit smoking on New
Year’s Day, and she seems to have stuck to it well enough to become a
spokesperson for the entire non-smoking community.
Charlotte Church, whose hobbies include slagging everyone off and
making ill-judged chatshows, had been smoking for four years and,
although she’s given up, still finds it hard to leave cigarettes alone
completely, especially when she’s off her nut on booze:
"I still find it hard to drink and not smoke. When I go out I have to hold a cigarette, I’m so used to having it in
my hand. But I don’t light it. I won’t be drinking so much anymore,
either."
So why did Charlotte Church quit smoking in the first place? Simple: she was worried about her career:
"I smoked about 20 or 25 a day and I’d tried to
give up a couple of times before, but only lasted half a day. In the
past four or five months before I gave up, it was affecting my voice,
my breathing control, my tone and I thought: ‘What am I doing here?’"
If
only quitting smoking managed to help people stop releasing
disappointing, sub-Girls Aloud albums too, then Charlotte Church really
would be on a path to glory.
Read more:
Charlotte: I’m out of puff… – This Is London
[story by Stuart Heritage]