Basic B*tch

On the most depressing day of the year

There was a time when tales of everyday addiction were bound to be mainly about smoking

— the smoking of cigarettes, that is, the old ‘coffin nails’, the accursed fags. If I had been writing this about 20 years ago, the subject of smoking above all others would have dominated the New Year conversations — it seemed that more people wanted to give up the fags than wanted to give up anything else.

I remember that time quite well, but it seems so far back in the past, I couldn’t tell you when exactly the issue of cigarette-smoking, and its general acceptability, stopped being a matter of public debate — I couldn’t even give you an approximate time for that, it just seemed to drift away from the public consciousness over a long period, until eventually it just wasn’t there any more. Like the smog.

The smoking ban in pubs was a crucial move, physically isolating the unfortunate smokers.

Indeed, the effectiveness of that ban in changing the culture has doubtless been noted by the purveyors of other highly addictive pursuits such as online gambling, who are fanatically resisting the most paltry attempts at regulation — from observing the smoking ban, they know that it is possible for governments to make things a lot more difficult for them if they really want to, but of course most governments don’t really want to — indeed, they don’t see there’s a problem at all.

The cigarettes industry in general has been the great teacher of those who came after them, in the way they achieved such success by advertising incessantly and with the maximum levels of dishonesty in order to create generations of addicts

— and now in the way they are failing in the western world at least, because the profound cynicism of their operations was eventually unravelled.

The same will happen with online gambling, but it will take a long time, and the casualties will be horrendous — meanwhile, it will be seen as a relatively acceptable part of the atmosphere. Like the smog.

So I have written just once in ‘50 Ways...’ about the way to give up smoking, and my advice is different to any public health campaign that I’ve seen

— because in my version, in order to get off the cigarettes, first you really need to get off the drink.

The film director Luis Bunuel described drink and cigarettes as “the queen and her consort”, and in most of our tales of addiction they are inseparable, yet you rarely see them together when talk turns to discontinuing one or the other.

My own experience was that I found it harder to give up the cigarettes than the drink; indeed, I was smoking for about three years after I stopped drinking. But I know that whatever difficulties I was going through as I was trying to chuck away the 40 Bensons a day, would have been immeasurably worse if I was still going out to pubs, and further weakening my resolve with pints.

In fact, as a drinker and a smoker, I would have considered it impossible to be drinking but not smoking. But I found that I could smoke without drinking. And finally I found that I could do neither, and still have some desire to go on living — incredible though it seemed. The two things went together for me, right from the start. I was about 18, drinking a pint in a pub, when someone offered me a Rothmans — and I took it, and it nearly blew my head off. What was this buzz that I’d been missing?

You’d think that that probably couldn’t happen now — unless somebody offered me one as I was standing outside in the smoking zone. And would it not be strange for me to be there if I wasn’t smoking anyway? Frankly, after enough drink, you’ll do things that are a lot stranger.

“The same will happen with online gambling as with smoking, but it will take a long time”