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It’s crisis time for Simon Gray, too. Best friends dead and dying, his own tobacco health no great shakes, the body reluctant and unwieldy – for which, as I try covering up the triangles of killer light, first with what’s left of a sandwich I’ve been eating, then with The Last cheap cigarettes itself (a manoeuvre that involves balancing it on my ankles and bending double to read the words), I have considerable fellow feeling. “Not exactly serenity, more a gentle vacancy of spirit,” Gray writes, describing that “suspended mood when you know there’s much to worry about but you can’t remember what it is”. All we have to look forward to now – a gentle vacancy of spirit, which is a great thought because it admits its impossibility, or at least its fleetingness, in the utterance.