I just can’t quit smoking!’
I became much healthier during eight months of furlough in 2020 during the pandemic, drastically cutting down on beer and having much more time for hillwalking. So my weight fell from nearly 20st to under 16st. But I still wasn’t able to stop smoking. When I have colds I develop the most grotesque coughs and I swear blind I will give up. When I am better I have the self-deception of: “Oh well, it’s not doing me so much harm at the moment so I’ll carry on.” My dentist, seeing the state of my yellowed teeth, suggested I should quit and I told her: “The Virgin Mary couldn’t stop me.” It may need some divine intervention.
For most the habit begins by experimentation, then being a
“casual smoker” and then the nicotine addiction creeps up and overtakes.
I tried my first ever cigarettes while I was drunk on a night out with friends at the age of 18 in July 1982. Something possessed me to buy a packet from a dance hall vending machine.
One of our group was trying to give up and was furious with me.
First he lectured me on what the habit does to you and then said: “I’m going
to take you running tomorrow and if you don’t keep up I’ll thump you.”
He then told me to hand over the packet to another in our group who didn’t smoke. I remember that second guy holding his hand out for it - like a teacher trying to confiscate from the naughty schoolboy. But I refused to give it to him. I’d finished the entire packet by next day and forgot about smoking.
Then at Christmas 1982, during a student vacation job at Selfridges in London, my manager gave me a box of 50 cigarettes as a gift.
Even then it took me three months to finish it.
Once again I forgot the fags until the summer of 1984, when I would take the occasional one when I was drunk. During 1985, after leaving university, it gradually crept up on me until that December, which became the first month I puffed every single day. I was 21 then and it has been like that ever since.
I even carried on while having bronchitis in the summer of 1999.
Yet, strangely, I couldn’t stop under the best influences.
For 10 years, until I was 43, I was in a football group and admired the other guys who were sharp, funny and confident.
They were nearly all anti-smoking. Either it never appealed to them or they hated it because of the smell and harmful effects. They took pride in their physical fitness.
Sometimes they took me to task, like after an evening match when I doubled up in a violent coughing fit.
At the pub later one of them said: “Sam, you gotta stop smoking.”
Another said: “Yeah, listening to you on that pitch tonight...” I can still remember the way he shook his head in despair.
The ban on smoking in enclosed public places began in the UK on July 1, 2007. One of the lads had a single-word reaction: “Result.” This has saved others from passive smoking, which was needed.
But many of us smokers were not steered into giving up by the 2007 ban and have simply adapted by stepping outside for a drag.
I have tried nicotine patches and gum, e-cigarettes and vapes but I have not taken to any of them.
But I would encourage people trying to quit not to be put off by my failure. Many have succeeded with little or no difficult withdrawal symptoms.
Don’t be disheartened by not succeeding in your attempts as you can keep trying. The writer Samuel Beckett once said: “Tried, failed, tried again, failed better.”
But beware that you can lapse if you do succeed. A friend of mine gave up for a year, then in a moment of madness took one cigarette and was soon hooked again.
The best advice I can give never start!