“Giving up smoking is really good for your health,” they said.
“Giving up smoking will put years on your life and make you feel like a million dollars,” they said.
I beg to differ, but I’ll tell you why a bit later.
If you look at the date of this entry and the one that precedes it, you’ll realise I haven’t exactly been peppering the blogosphere with my thoughts about giving up. That’s because in terms of nicotine addiction I haven’t had many thoughts for quite a while.
Nearly three months in, I hardly even think about tobacco. My own smoking, which began while I was in junior school and continued throughout my adult life, seems now to be something that happened to another person entirely. The other day I took part in a photo session for a Swindon Advertiser spread about giving up. Part of it entailed my holding a lit cigarette – of my old brand – and stubbing it out.
Apart from an easily-suppressed reflex telling me to bend my arm and put the Lambie into my mouth, I felt nothing. It’s just as well I don’t update this blog every day, because if I carried on in this vein I’d give you the impression I was one of those insufferable non-smokers who proclaim how easy it is to give up, and how weak-willed those still on the tabs are. I always despised people like that when I was smoking, and I despise them now.
Yes, giving up smoking is very easy in my experience – but only if the time has come for you to give up. As I said in the article that accompanied the pictures the other day, if you try to give up for any other reason than that you have simply had enough, you are in for a tough time.
If you fail, it does not mean you are a weak person; it simply means that, for you, the time is not yet right. Do not beat yourself up and – above all – do not imagine that you will never be able to stop.
Obviously, the sooner the time is right for any given smoker, the sooner they can give up a deadly and wasteful habit, but that’s entirely a matter for the individual.
Mind you, if it’s any comfort to those still struggling with nicotine, I may have got off lightly when it came to withdrawal symptoms, but there have been other difficulties.
At the beginning of this entry, I said I’d been told that giving up would be good for my health and make me feel like a million dollars.
To tell you the truth, lately I’ve spent rather a lot of time coughing myself more or less inside out and feeling not so much like a million dollars as like a grubby one dollar bill that’s been dropped into a mucky gutter, gnawed by a rat and used as a blanket by a family of cockroaches.
Apparently one is susceptible to more coughs and colds during the first few months after giving up.
Or maybe the tar was the only thing holding me together.

IT’S now getting on for a month and a half since my last cigarette.
In fact, it’s probably longer than that. To tell you the truth, I was never one to count the days, which only brings home to me how fortunate I’ve been in comparison to other giver-uppers with my relative lack of tribulations.
As you know, my original plan was to stop smoking at midnight on New Year’s Eve and then record the hideous withdrawal symptoms for posterity. The best laid plans of mice and nicotine junkies, however, are made to fall apart, and I ended up smoking my last cigarette on Christmas Day before a cold temporarily robbed me of any urge to smoke. I’ve had no withdrawal symptoms worthy of the name. The odd pang, I’ll grant you, especially when I have a pint pot in my hand, but nothing drastic enough to traumatise me.
As I said, I’ve been fortunate. I’ve known people whose attempts to give up, even if successful, were an exercise in miserable torment. “If I can only survive another day…” “If I can only survive another week…” Some were still going through this sort of thing after months away from the weed – and I was one of them during my last (failed) attempt to give up many years ago.
I have a feeling that your state of mind when you smoke your last cigarette has a lot to do with your success or failure. I don’t mean that in a touchy-feely motivational sense, although there is nothing wrong with touchy-feely motivational techniques so long as they get the job done.
I do not stand in front of the mirror and tell myself that I’m a non-smoker.
I am not a non-smoker and I can’t see myself as ever being a non-smoker. Rather, I am a smoker who became thoroughly bored and disgusted by smoking and decided not to do it again.

SO here I am, a non-smoker since Christmas Day, and suddenly indulging in the odd fantasy about smoking.
This is in spite of the nicotine being out of my system. Since my last entry, I’ve even been able to visit the pub again without experiencing anything more than the briefest craving. Oh, and a passing desire to hang around outside and catch a little second hand smoke.
My smoking fantasies, then, come as a strange surprise when I find myself indulging in one. For instance, I just had to break off from typing this blog entry. You see, I was suddenly distracted by the thought of how invitingly overstuffed a pack of 20 feels in the hand before you take any out of it. Is it just me, or do American brands such as Marlboro feel especially succulent? And then when you tear away the little piece of silver paper inside, there are fewer more inviting sensory pleasures than that little waft of tobacco odour.
Where was I? I’d hate to come across as incoherent.
Camels. I used to love unfiltered Camels even though the first hit from one was nearly enough to knock your block off. I’ve missed them ever since they seemed to vanish from British shop shelves about 15 years ago. Presumably they were banned on health grounds.
But I’m a non-smoker, so I don’t miss them any more. Well, I certainly don’t miss them as much as I miss those expensive Turkish cigarettes that came in a luxurious box and had an oval cross-section.
Or Capstan full strength. Or Senior Service. Or black Sobranies with the gold foil filter. People thought you had your lips clamped together in a strange way around a black Sobranie because you were enigmatic and sophisticated, but in fact it was because you were worried about the cigarette shooting from your mouth and causing who knew what mayhem.
Or Lambert and Butler in spite of them being cheap and tasting rather unpleasant. Or because of their being cheap and tasting rather unpleasant.
I could smoke a pipe. I always wanted to give that a try. You don’t have to inhale, so it wouldn’t be as bad as those nasty cigarettes.
I could take snuff. I haven’t had snuff since I was about 12 and there was a craze for it at school.
What was I saying? Ah yes, I was writing about how easy it is to conquer one’s addiction to smoking, no matter how long one spent as a smoker.
Even though the thought of using any tobacco product fills me with revulsion and horror, the mind is a strange thing. Worryingly, my own mind seems to be stranger than most.
I do hope it hasn’t been this strange all along, and the tobacco was suppressing the weirdness.

THERE are certain hurdles in your career as a born-again non-smoker, and one of them is your first proper trip to the pub.
As hurdles go, it’s not a flimsy one of the kind that can be knocked over by an athlete’s heel with no fear of anybody being injured. I only wish it were, but it is in fact more like a dirty great brick wall with shards of broken bottles embedded in the top and a machine gun tower at either end.
I suspect that more people fall at this hurdle – more pubgoers, I mean – than any other. I’ve seen it happen time and again, including to myself many years ago.
Having given up smoking some five months before that fatal evening in a bar, I became a little reckless while on the outside of a few pints and decided to accept the offer of a cigarette. After all I was, was I not, a non-smoker? I had, had I not, foregone tobacco for several months? Surely, then, I could take it or leave it. Not for me that filthy, pathetic nicotine addiction: I would smoke purely for pleasure, as and when the mood took me.
That night in the pub, I accepted another cigarette, cadged a third and was back to 20 or 25 a day within 48 hours. The monkey that had lately vacated my back soon made himself so thoroughly comfortable that it was as if he had never left.
You can imagine, then, the trepidation with which I approached my first visit to a bar after giving up again, even though, as I explained in my last entry, I seem to have been spared the worst of the usual withdrawal symptoms by virtue of their having been masked by a particularly nasty dose of man-flu.
I was right to be worried. As soon as I took my first drink, my sudden awareness that I could taste beer properly for the first time in years was almost immediately overwhelmed by a craving that came from nowhere. Even though the thought of smoking revolted me, I still wanted a cigarette.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the craving passed, only to return occasionally and briefly throughout the evening.
The cravings came roughly at the intervals when I would normally have a cigarette, which only goes to prove the extent to which smoking is a psychological as well as a physical habit.
My evening in the pub also uncovered another menace: people who gave up smoking back in the days when lighting up in bars was still legal. Times were harder and temptations stronger back then, it seems. There were moments when I felt as if I were in the middle of some strange variation on the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch:
“You people giving up smoking these days have it easy. Back in my day – ee, it were about a year ago – you weren’t allowed in’t pub unless you were smoking an entire pack of Capstan Full Strength all at once and rubbing nicotine extract into your eyeballs.”
I later went home and had a squirt of nicotine nasal spray. It was reassuringly disgusting and I haven’t had one in the five days or so that have passed since.

IF you’ve read the Shape Up Swindon update in the print edition of the newspaper, you’ll know that I’ve been cheating on my non-smoking pledge.
No, not cheating in the usual way of folk who give up smoking as a New Year’s resolution. I haven’t been disappearing to remote locations at odd moments and firing up Lambert and Butlers. I haven’t even been hanging around smokers and hoping to catch a stray lungful.
The fact is, to my way of thinking at least, I’ve been cheating right from the beginning – firstly because I didn’t give up on New Year’s Eve at all and secondly because the worst pangs of early withdrawal were masked by the effects of one of the worst colds I’ve ever had.
I smoked my last cigarette some time during the evening of December 25 and then felt so wretched that I didn’t leave the sofa for about three days. The very thought of smoking, even though I used to get through 10 or 15 a day, made me gag and cough like a consumptive 19th century poet about to take his place alongside Byron, Shelley and their mates among the delicate dead.
Therefore, whereas going through horrible nicotine withdrawal is supposed to be part and parcel of the first few days most people spend off the fags (and the thing most likely to make them light up again), I seem to have missed out.
The nearest I come to lighting up is the occasional mild urge. I take a few deep breaths and the urge goes away. Sometimes – every other day or so - the cravings are stronger, in which case I’ll chew a quarter of a piece of nicotine gum or have half a squirt of nicotine nasal spray.
Both of these items are so thoroughly disgusting that my concentration is immediately diverted from the shrinking nicotine monkey on my back and toward more pressing matters, such as keeping my last meal on board.
So there you have it: my first blog update after giving up smoking and I have a disappointing lack of horror stories to share. Is there anybody else out there who gave up lately and is finding their addiction going out with a whimper rather than a bang? Am I some sort of freak? I suppose it must be different for everybody.
Anyway, please feel free to comment. I have the urge to compare notes.

I’VE decided to give up smoking because I’m 40 years old and would rather
like to see 80.
Smoking is about as sensible as approaching an underworld hitman, handing
him a suitcase full of cash and asking him to flip a coin and decide whether to kill you or not.
In fact, it’s probably less sensible, as underworld hitmen generally pride
themselves on doing their work as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Also, hiring one is probably cheaper than spending decades buying cigarettes.
I began smoking cigarettes stolen from my dad when my age was still in
single figures; I’ve been a regular smoker for most of my adult life. I
smoked about 20 a day until my partner gave up a couple of years ago. Since
then I’ve halved my intake and stopped smoking indoors at home.
I managed to give up for about five months more than a decade ago by going
cold turkey, then made the common mistake of having “just one” in a bar. It
was soon a case of: “Hello addiction, my old friend.”
This time, I plan to read the long version of Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop
Smoking, and perhaps listen to a few self-hypnosis tapes.
Oh, and I also plan to be completely honest, both with myself and with
others, so if I happen to have any lapses (and I’m not planning to), I won’t
shy away from admitting them.