In mid-September, I quit smoking. More accurately, people who love me kept yelling about how they didn’t want me to die, so now I have to smoke a USB stick. I am writing this sitting in my room, with my vape, having been successfully peer pressured out of something I was once peer pressured into. There is a pleasing symmetry to this, hampered only by the fact that, in the intervening time, I have become a drug addict.

While e-cigarettes are increasingly popular in the UK, they are still rare enough and, crucially, varied enough in design to elicit occasional confusion. This has become apparent to me as a result of the fact that I keep forgetting to charge my cigarette – which is a sentence that makes me hate the world and myself – and consequently end up having to use the portable phone charger and small dongle I keep in my jacket, which allows me to charge it on the tube.

The assembling of electronic equipment on public transport, combined with the resultant flashing lights and my general aesthetic, has caused the occasional commuter to flash me a look of what is quite clearly brief reflexive panic, at which point I have to try not to laugh and instead give them a reassuring look and attempt to blink my general fondness for the west in morse code.

I belong to the one group of people – young, bearded brown men – for whom the utilisation of obscure electronic devices in public probably poses a larger personal safety risk than smoking. I know cigarettes have myriad horrendous health implications, but I’m extremely unlikely to get see it, say it, sorted for having a fag.

Shopping for a vape was initially mystifying, because the sort of people who are into writing about vaping on the internet use phrases such as “your vape journey” (it’s a delivery mechanism for a mild stimulant, not a gap year). In the end, I tried one that a friend had, liked it and bought it without investigating its aggregated online star rating – like someone from the past.

Awkwardly, it turns out that the brand of vape I have chosen is under fire at the moment because loads of kids in the US have become hooked on it. The threat to the health of American children means there is the prospect of a major regulatory crackdown, which I know sounds weird given the whole “machine guns” thing, but does actually make sense. The nicotine level in the US product is three times higher than in the one sold here, and it’s probably not great to have a generation of children going about their daily lives while steadily consuming enough nicotine to put Winston Churchill in a coma.

Personally, despite having been sceptical before buying one, I hope these devices stick around. Partly because, if you’re an existing smoker, they are still a damn sight healthier than actual cigarettes; partly because even the reduced nicotine version still broadly does the job; partly because replacing an addiction to burning leaves with an addiction to the proprietary capsules of a Silicon Valley tech startup is the most millennial thing I have ever done.

Mainly, however, I like the fact that this alternative means I can quit smoking but keep withdrawal. Withdrawal is, perhaps paradoxically, the best part of addiction. It’s so natural to feel that something is deeply, profoundly wrong with you. So rare to know exactly how to fix it.

A life well lived that united the generations across three continents



In early September, Dadi died. My grandmother was around for a long time, happy and healthy for most of it, and loved for all of it. She was born in 1930 with a life expectancy of 27, because at the time the British government wanted to maximise the chances of every Indian releasing a seminal rock album. Under those circumstances, making it to 87 is a result.

She moved from India to London to live with us a few weeks after I was born (she had been quite suddenly widowed) and for the first five years of my life we were inseparable. When I was five years old, she was deported – it turns out we were actually extremely separable. She was sent back by a Conservative Home Office that wasn’t particularly understanding of individual circumstance and instead tended to view immigrants as statistical problems rather than human beings (imagine!). As a result, we only saw each other a handful of times over the next two decades.

I spent last August at the Edinburgh fringe doing a stand-up comedy show largely about a trip I took to India the previous winter, during which I saw her for the first time in years. Spending time with her felt important even though the dementia meant that, for the most part, she no longer recognised me (it’s all considerably funnier than it sounds). I finished the run and went back to London; a couple of days later my dad suddenly rushed off to India to see his mum for the last time; a couple of days after that, she went. Great timing runs in the family.

On the day she passed away, I saw my family and we spent a lot of time talking to other family members in India and the US. We all have to go eventually. If, when the time comes, people across three continents spend the day ringing each other to agree about how excellent you are, I think it’s safe to say you have played a blinder. Here’s to Jaividya Shah, the last Empress of India.

Now I’m a card-carrying railway blagger



In late September, I bought a year-long rail season ticket between two villages I have never been to. I have done this because it’s the cheapest season ticket that also comes with an Annual Gold Card, which gets you a third off most travel in southern England. It’s £160 but, in the continued absence of a 26-30 Railcard, it will still save me a few times more than it costs. I don’t know how to fix the railways. I used to think that nationalisation was the answer. I now think that won’t do much other than change who we blame, although maybe that’s worthwhile in and of itself. However, it does seem there is a problem with the system when the only way to access it affordably is to pretend you live and work in rural Warwickshire.

Ahir Shah presents his Edinburgh Comedy award-nominated stand-up show Duffer at the Soho Theatre, London W1, 11-27 October and is on tour thereafter