Personality

The problem with personality is that there is no discernable cut off. It seems to me that it’s impossible to say some people are positive and others negative, it’s not a Boolean on/off function. I prefer the notion of intersecting rainbows where one end resides in a pot of gold and the other a vat with the dismembered body of Katie Hopkins filled up with excrement. But focus on the rainbows.

It’s this mental impression of personality that holds me to a belief that no one apart from Katie Hopkins is purebred evil. Pol Pot may have massacred between 2 to 3 million people but, by all accounts, he always sent his mother flowers and was a massive fan of The Two Ronnies – especially Ronnie Corbett’s seated monologues to camera.

The Spock-like logical side to me knows that mods, coils and atomisers have no soul. I fully appreciate the in-human nature of metal. And yet I can help but feel that sometimes, shortly before I wake up, they get together on the rack and plan out to the finest detail exactly how they’re going to ruin my day.

Just look at your box mod, now. Do it.

See that? See those buttons? They follow you around the room. I swear there’s a hive-like collective intelligence like that exhibited by a colony of ants. A single one is stupid – but lob a load of them together like the Argentine Ant super colony stretching 3,728 miles from Italy to Portugal. The same thing if you managed to clone Katie Hopkins and make a billion of them live together without access to Twitter.

No. Sometimes atomisers are egged on by the rest of the collection: “Go on, Gary, you’re nearly empty. You know he’s going to recoil you later. Just mess him about a bit for shits and giggles.”

And so that coil you’ve made a hundred times before, the one you know always runs in at 1.1Ω, gives an odd reading. Or the reading flits about. Or, halfway through vaping, the regulated mod finds the ability to throw up 1,000 watts. But mainly that the wick and coil that operate so effectively on a daily basis suddenly don’t wick juice.

Damn your hide, denizens of the rack, I know what you’re doing – I can hear your tinny chuckles. But it isn’t just that they conspire to mess me about, they constantly flummox me by simply working.

I’d put off getting the new Kayfun for a whole host of reasons. It struck me that the level of complexity of the device was overkill and that, combined with the cost, it would fail to reward me. Of course there was also fear. Not fear that I’d be unable to master the thing, more the fear that being a sizable lump I’d not want to be hit with it when my partner discovered I’d bought yet another addition to the collection. My expectations couldn’t have been lower, like when my daughter made me watch La Hopkins in an episode of Big House Full Of People No One Knows (apart from Cheggers and that vessel of spite in human form).

“Go on Sharon, mess with his head. He thinks you’re nothing – but there are two types of atomisers, those that do and those that don’t. Be the atomiser that does.”