Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces of coercive conformity. As far as I see it, the path to the grave is lined with compromise after compromise until, at the moment of the final rattle, one has become a travesty, physically and spiritually, of the person one used to be. Not that I would want to overdramatise the whole thing, mind.

I more usually tend to present my dis-avowal of smoking as a kind of glorious epiphany. One moment I smoked, the next I didn’t. And in a sense that is true: no doctors were involved, there were no health scares, nor was I nagged to give up by those close to me. I went to bed one evening – at 23.30 on 4 October 2021, to be precise – and awoke the next day somehow ‘knowing’ that I would never smoke again. There was no real struggle. I left out – inadvertently at first, but then with a kind of smug satisfaction – a three-quarters-full packet of Super-kings on the kitchen worktop. I would look at them from time to time and think: ‘Oh yes – cigarettes. I used to smoke a lot but I don’t any more. Funny.’

I had been on about 60 a day for a good 15 years and probably 40 a day for the preceding 30 years. My first cigarette was given to me as a nasty trick – an older boy handed me a Capstan Full Strength when I was about 12 years old, expecting I would end up convulsed and choking. Nope, it tasted great: me and fags, I thought, we’re made for each other. I was brought up in a small house in which the other occupants – my mother and father – got through about 80 cigarettes each day – Lambert and Butler for him, Embassy for her – so I suppose I had become accustomed.