JENNI MURRAY
This year’s reignited my secret vice
THrEE years ago, in 2018, I wrote proudly of what I considered to be one of my greatest achievements. I had given up smoking. It was hard. I’d been a smoker since I nicked a fag from Dad’s packet around the age of 16. Please don’t ask why I persevered back then when it made me dizzy and sick. I guess it was because my friends and I all thought we were really cool as we gathered outside the bowling alley or behind the bike sheds for a quick one.
I gave up twice during two pregnancies, but as soon as the birth was over, I couldn’t wait to get started again. This time, however, I really thought I’d cracked it. I had a vape for a little while, which gave me something to do with my hands, then I kept nicotine gum in business for a short time, and then I said: ‘OK, that’s it. No more nicotine. You don’t need it. Just stop.’
I felt much better. My breathing improved, my cough all but disappeared, I enjoyed going out for walks and getting exercise rather than wasting time sitting down with a coffee and a cigarette. Life had changed for the better.
Then, a year ago, life suddenly changed for the worse for us all. Lockdown. Nowhere to go. Noone to see. My family at one end of the country and me at the other. No company at home apart from three dogs and a cat.
I was still going to the BBC to present Woman’s Hour, but masks had to be worn in the taxi, temperature checked on entering Broadcasting House, hardly anyone there and no guests to interview in person, all down the line.
It was after a particularly difficult day of technical difficulties, frightening news about Covid admissions to hospital and the realisation that my 70th birthday in May was to be spent at home alone, that I felt that familiar ache. One packet wouldn’t do any harm, would it? I could just smoke one and throw the rest away.
Yeah, right! From years of experience, I should have known that was unlikely. I’m now smoking at least ten a day!
Was it just loneliness and boredom that drove me back to it or is the addiction to nicotine too powerful? I don’t even enjoy it. I hate the stinking, full ashtray on the table where I sit to write. It disgusts me, but I continue.
There is, I suspect an element of rebellion. When the government was bossing us about in those early days, and not always as comprehensively as it should have done, were those of us who went back to old bad habits merely saying: ‘No, we’re free to do as we please, thank you.’ We didn’t like the idea of rules.
We did try to stay home, never shake hands and keep socially distanced, but I think it awakened an almost childlike need to refuse to obey.
As the rules continue to be enforced even though more than 90 per cent of over-50s in England have now been vaccinated, as we all struggle to remember what’s allowed and what isn’t, maybe some of the ministers and scientists who were so keen on telling us how to behave might reflect on the negative impact to our health — the inevitable overeating, smoking and drinking that goes on to compensate.
As things begin to brighten up — hair do on Monday, manicure, pedicure and second Pfizer jab on Wednesday — it will be time to take myself in hand again. Or so I tell myself.
When I saw the chest X-ray for my broken rib (I tripped and fell outside the supermarket a couple of weeks ago), I expressed my relief at seeing ‘no indication of lung cancer, yet.’
‘Do not say “yet”,’ retorted the lovely consultant. ‘Give up. Now!’ I promised I would. Soon.