Ex smokers are the worst

I start with a confession.

Although I have not smoked a cigarette in nearly 20 years, I do enjoy one from time to time.

It is only later on in the same day when I think to myself: did I really smoke that fag?

I don’t remember buying a pack of cigarettes or scrounging one off someone else.

I never scrounged fags anyway because other people’s brands always tasted worse than mine. I was a Peter Stuyvesant man until 31st December 1993.

So despite having given up, how come I am still smoking?

It’s because, from time to time, I dream about smoking and more specifically I dream I am smoking, as if I have never given up.

And that’s strange because the longer I stayed away from smoking, the more I came to hate it.

I hate the smell, I hate the cost but most of all I hate the terrible damage cigarettes do to people and many of those people were related to me.

My mother survived into her seventies you might say despite her terrible habit but in truth life in terms of a meaningful existence had ceased to be long before then.

All her medical conditions, the heart disease, the odd mini-stroke, the blockages in her legs that almost brought about amputation caused her absolute agony, indescribable pain that ruined her life.

But still she continued to ‘enjoy’ the habit that did the damage.

Her mother’s health was badly affected by cigarettes and it certainly killed her father who died of lung cancer.

Like most smokers, I suspect, I believed that I would somehow be immune to the 300 or so carcinogens that loiter in each cigarette, that the worst thing that would happen to me would be dog’s breath (and that’s an insult to dogs) and that my clothes would smell (and my house, my pets and, if I carried on smoking that long) my children too.

Smoking killed other people but not me. And the earth-shattering splutter emanating from my chest each morning was nothing to worry about, or rather nothing to think about because if I had thought about it I’d have never have started smoking in the first place. No. The day’s first fag would clear the tubes!

It didn’t occur to me how much I stank of cigarettes until someone told me. My friend Christine in Manchester, with whom I was staying, mentioned how bad my breath was. That’s what friends are for, I thought, but it wasn’t welcome advice.

It was several years before I made a serious attempt to quit.

And on 1st January 1994 we managed it and we managed it for good.

The last pack I bought cost £2.48 but now the same brand retails at something like £8 a pack. If we were to start smoking now at the same rate as we did pre 1994, we’d spend well over £100,000 (of taxed income) over the next 20 years, assuming we’d live long enough to spend it.

My father, who died in 2011, was an ex smoker too and blamed some of the conditions he had in later life on smoking. He was also a militant anti-smoker.

He lived in Ottawa and at the time of this story there was no smoking ban in public places such as restaurants. He hated ‘second hand smoke’ as he called it and did everything in his power to avoid it.

One day he telephoned a local restaurant to book a table for 20. He went through the menu in great detail, ensuring that the bill would be monumental. The manager was suitably impressed and went out of his way to be helpful.

At the end of the conversation, my father asked, “Oh by the way, do you allow smoking in your restaurant. This is very important to me!”

“Why of course, Sir,” came the reply. “We have no restrictions here.”

“In that case,” said my father, “Please cancel the booking forthwith and I’ll be in touch when you have banned smoking from your restaurant!”

Petty? Childish? Maybe, but he was making a point in a way in which I’d never have the brass neck to do!

In England, at least, we have now had nearly six years where smoking has been banned from public places.

And from where I am sitting, occasionally in the pub for example, it is hard to imagine we ever allowed smoking in public at all.

It must be awful being the smoker these days, scratching around for somewhere outside in the cold and rain for a place to indulge the habit, the expensive and ultimately fateful addiction. And I totally understand why they carry on smoking. Quitting was hard, the hardest thing I ever did.

I almost feel a little dirty when I wake up having smoked in Dream Land because just for a moment it seems real and I’m the hopeless nicotine addict of 1993 and before, stinking to high heaven with dog’s breath and a lot less money.

An old friend of mine, sadly long gone, was once admitted to hospital after a heart attack and was being cared for in the Coronary Care Unit of a local hospital.

When I visited him a few days later, he asked me how many of the 15 people in the ward, having suffered varying degrees of heart problems, were smokers.

I guess five or six.

“All of us,” he replied, “And some of them have had limbs removed. They get the nurses to wheel them outside for a fag.”

He died the next year and whilst it took me a few years following to really learn the lesson, I’m glad I finally did.

You can’t fight the fellow with the bright night gown and the fight will be immeasurably more painful and futile with each passing cigarette.