Out of puff

The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades.

The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades. ‘This diary is going to be about my attempt to give up smoking,’ he writes on page 1:

It is also going to be my main help in giving up smoking. By the time I’ve finished it I will be a free man, able to leave the house without my two packets of cigarettes, and my two lighters, able to sit down and read without compulsively checking that I’ve got these four articles in place on the desk in front of me or on the little table beside me . . . I shall never again have to grope for a cigarette while watching television . . . nor worry that I might fall asleep with a cigarette burning on the brink of an ashtray, or while hanging from my lips.
To reveal the outcome of this endeavour may seem as bad as giving away the ending of a detective novel, but the signs that Gray is going to fail start appearing almost immediately — the rants against smoking bans, the constant deferrals, the feeble excuses.

On holiday on the Greek island of Spetses, he writes:

I’m not ready to give up smoking yet. Insufficiently settled. I tried yesterday, managed until dinner, but then sitting in the café, a coffee in front of me, the sea lapping softly a few yards away, and such a moon! — It was the moon that did it — the moon’s fault.