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.

During the Covid lockdown, the kindly Indian boss of my local convenience store, one mile distant, would visit the cash and carry and on the way back to his shop make a slight detour and sling out of his window into my drive two blocks of Superkings, which kept me going for a week or so. Anyway, I digress. Binning cigarettes was, curiously, a doddle.

There were two immediate health benefits. First, I became tired less easily, could walk further without becoming exhausted – and as a consequence I lost weight. Second, I ceased to cough up chunks of lung first thing in the morning. I slightly miss this expectoration – there was a certain ragged glory to it, especially if blood was involved.

So far as I am aware there have been no other health benefits. The medical clergy assure me that my risk of a heart attack or a stroke has halved and that my chance of getting lung cancer will reduce by 39 per cent four years from now. But I don’t think I believe any of this guff and suspect the figures are gerrymandered or downright lies. I don’t doubt that smoking is harmful to one’s health, but I do doubt the veracity of all those encomiums to force us to give up.

Meanwhile, I caught Covid almost immediately, having evaded the thing for nigh on two years and been vaccinated, and various other minor, niggling health problems cropped up, which served to diminish the foolish belief I had in the first four weeks of being tobacco-free – that now nothing could kill me and I would live for ever.

But to say it was an epiphany is not the whole truth. It was, rather, a contingent epiphany. I had become infuriated by the hassle of smoking. First, the cost. I spent somewhere in the region of £800 a month on cigarettes. That struck me as ludicrous and obscene: it is the cost of a mortgage, no? More than half of the 13 quid cost of a packet of 20 is tax – i.e. the government persecuting me for something which I enjoyed. And doing so ‘for my own good’. I still find this vexing: the hypocrisy and the sanctimony.

Then there was having to stand outside a pub as the rain lashes in from the North Sea, or having to exit a restaurant for a cigarette between courses. The diminishing varieties of cigarettes on sale as the market decreased in size, meaning I would have to change my brand every few months. The spite and sententiousness of banning people from smoking in the open air, especially railway station platforms.

All of that stuff, designed to make people like me give up smoking, finally worked – and I hate them for it, for their smugness and their gleeful persecution. I hate Ash, I hate the GMC, I hate the government – all the more so now, because they won.

Long gone is the time when on those fatuous National Stop Smoking Days I would get up extra early to cram in a few extra fags, my way of sticking two fingers up to the people who want to police my life. This is the point. I do not miss smoking at all and I will never smoke again. But I do remember that it gave me great pleasure and that they were dead set on taking it away from me.

In the middle of this year I also binned drinking (or mostly – I am now well within the medically approved amount of alcohol per week), because having kicked smoking I reckoned I could give up alcohol too without much difficulty. Dead right. They exaggerate the difficulties of giving up stuff in order to dissuade people from starting, as well as giving credence to the whole giving-up industry with its stupid bloody counselling sessions and various step programmes. The giving up drinking was a case of showing off, really. Showing off is about the only antisocial habit I have left aside from urinating in public. And I daresay they’ll stop me doing that one of these days.