It’s a big day. A day for celebration, high fives and fist bumps. A day that was over thirty years in the making. A day where I fully deserve a pat on my back. But because of the plague, I’m just going to have to have this celebratory party here, virtually, with you. With virtual high fives. Nevermind. That this day has come is enough. But perhaps we need to go back to the start, to give the story some context.
The year is 1987 and I’m riding on the top deck of the 282 bus on a sunny afternoon in London with my best mate Keith, who offers me a cigarette. Which I put in my mouth, light up and smoke. But this cigarette is different to the two or three cigarettes I’d smoked before this one. I smoked those cigarettes Bill Clinton style. But this time, I inhaled. Not least because not inhaling causes one to be called ‘pussy boy’ by the other lads. No one wants to be ‘pussy boy’.
You know what? Once you get past the coughing, inhaling cigarette smoke is nice. You get a bit of a high. And the truth is, I immediately liked smoking. I’ve always liked smoking. That’s been the main trouble in stopping smoking. Why stop something you enjoy, especially when doing so makes you feel miserable and angry. I know, I know, I know. Lung cancer, heart disease, stinky habit etc etc blah blah blah. So I kept on smoking. There was always tomorrow.
The biggest impediment to smoking was, initially, my age. I was just fifteen and therefore not allowed to buy cigarettes. I could buy pipe tobacco and cigars no problem. The elderly Indian chap in his stereotypical corner shop, would happily sell youngsters those. But if you tried to buy cigarettes, he’d smile and point to the sticker on the counter which stated that it was illegal to sell cigarettes to those under sixteen. He took that sign so freakishly literally.
But I found ways to get my hands on them. And a few months before my sixteenth birthday, my National Insurance card came through the post. A plastic, credit card sized piece of gold for the underage smoker. Accepted by everyone, everywhere in the 1980s, I could now buy a packet of fags whenever I wanted from whomever I wanted. Freedumb!
So that was my first cigarette. Many more followed. Indeed, I just did the maths. A quarter of a million cigarettes followed. I smoked Benson and Hedges Gold for many years. I flirted with Embassy No 1s and Raffles, but B&H were the trendy smokes. At some point I switched to rolling tobacco, because it’s much cheaper. Golden Virgina was my preferred brand. In Mexico I returned to smoking ready made sticks of joy, Marlboro Blues. When I came back to Blighty, I changed again. Marlboro Blues in Mexico are different to the Blues here. So I puffed away on Pall Mall Reds.
But let’s whizz past that first cigarette and all the ones that followed. Let’s go back in time to one year ago, yesterday. I’m stood in Weymouth on a damp evening. I’ve only been back at work a few weeks, having been off sick with a lung wrecking virus for the best part of a month. I may have mentioned it in previous posts. It’s just gone six in the evening, my shift is over and I have a train to catch at twenty minutes past.
I light up a cigarette. It tastes as nice as all the others. It’s as satisfying as all the others. I enjoy it like all the others. But once I start filling my lungs with smoke, I just cannot fucking breathe. Necessity is the greatest motivation, I find. And the necessity to breathe trumps the simple pleasures of smoking. I finished that cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground. I swore it’d be the last.
I’d sworn that before, of course. I’d ‘tried’ to quit many times. But I never believed my own oaths. Not until this one. This time, I swore it’d be the last and I knew it’d be the last, because I simply didn’t have the lungs to continue. I put on a nicotine patch and quit. I’ve not had a single puff since then. Not one.
I made it through the first day, then the first week, then the first month. Now the first year. In a month and a half, when December 31 is over, I’ll celebrate having gone through a full calendar year. Hey, there will be one good thing about 2020. But then I’ll stop celebrating. Smoking will just be distant history.
Ask a million ex smokers for the best way to quit and you’ll get a million different answers. Let me give you the millionth and one. Quitting is actually quite straightforward. You just don’t put a cigarette in your mouth. It’s nothing any more complicated than that. How you ease your withdrawal symptoms is up to you. Don’t start complicating things by choosing special dates or anything else. None of it matters. Just don’t stick a cigarette in your mouth. It really is as easy as that. Simples.
The Mexile 
Good for you, good for P as well, a long life together is a great reward.
My favorite ‘first cigarette story is from my next to last year of high school. My friend Dale shows up in his 57 Oldsmobile to take my buddy Richard and I to our rural school. On the seat sat two packs of Marabours. I had to ask, “What’s this about”‘ he said, ” started smoking”. We’re on our way to school, 65 dead or alive, we were only 16 you know. The hood of the old car pops up on the safety latch. Fulling expecting to him to pull over and knock it back right, no, he says, “here hold the wheel”, and climbs out the window while we’re at speed and ‘fixes’ the hood. Gets back in and off to school it is. He was a risk taker of epic proportions for another 15 years, a smoker as well. He married at 18, it took his bride a little more than a decade to break his wild ways-the smoking took a bit longer. He developed a heart problem and had to stop. He like you, chose life, over nicotine .
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It’s always best if a smoker has the opportunity to choose life. Death, sadly, often intervenes and takes the choice away. My mum quite 15ish years ago after an asthma attack. Best thing that happened to her.
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Like you said, everyone has a different story about quitting smoking. I started smoking when I was just a kid, maybe between twelve and fourteen. Later when I went to American high school football games I lit one cigarette after another. So I smoked till I was in my early thirties. How did I quit. I have to say that it was easy. Around winter holiday time my company would shut down for four weeks. So being home all that time I would not smoke in front of my children. When I went back to work I did not have the desire to take up smoking again. Like I said, it was easy.
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It is funny how it is so much easier for some people to quit than others.
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Congratulations! Give yourself a reward, just stay far away from other smokers.
They are a bad influence.
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Happily, I’m so past the withdrawal symptoms that the smell of smoke no longer tempts me! Hope you’re all well over there, amigo.
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I used to smoke “Cigarellas”, remember them they had a dark brown paper soaked in sherry flavour? Once I got a taste of those nothing else compared. One of my pals called me “the toff” after that. I gave them up after burning through the nylon pocket of my aptly named blazer setting the pocket on fire. I wasn’t a chain smoker though but I’d go through two to three packs a weekend.
When Carm and I got married in 85’, we went to the Canaries on honeymoon and the cigars were a brilliant price and I brought back three hundred and a year later a party lit one up and was sick for three days. So haven’t smoked one since.
Of course in those days a dance was the length of a cigarette and a smoke screen was normal in the bars, at the cinema and dancehalls.
So congrats on giving them up, the savings especially these days are more than monetary and another bonus is getting to enjoy the flavour of your food and the long term benefit is more time to enjoy being with your soul mate.
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I’ve never quite understood cigars. You don’t fully inhale the fumes, do you? Seems too half hearted to me.
I do like the small of cigar smoke though. When I was a kid, I had two teachers, Mr Jones and Mr Wilcox, who’d stroll around the school with cigars in their mouths. That’d get them fired these days. But they’re both too long dead to care about such modern technicalities.
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My Grandfather went into the coal mines in Coatbridge at eight years of age was a life long smoker. He had quite a remarkable life however he smoked a pipe in later life and smoked two ounces a month. At Christmas and the odd special party of which we had many the men folk all broke out the cigars. My Mum was a teacher too and her parties very often had a collection of teachers, priests sometimes three or four, the odd artist and a variety of interesting characters. The conversations covered all sorts of subjects. I’ve often wondered if Steve’s parties were like that?
Some snipped off the end with a guillotine and others shaved the end off with a sharp knife. Sometimes the end would be dipped in brandy, whiskey or in a good sherry and sometimes poked in the end with a spike and then the business end carefully lit. In our house the ladies would have liqueurs and the gentlemen brandy sherry or Irish coffee. My Father didn’t smoke or drink due to health reasons but all the same we all enjoyed the perfume and aroma of cigars. My Grandfather used to keep the last inch of the cigar and mix it with his pipe tobacco to savour the last of it. In those days salt petre wasn’t added to the tobacco so when conversation took over the flame would go out.
I don’t or should I say I didn’t inhale smoke deeply into my lungs intentionally. One of my best pals who retired from a five hundred euro an hour maintenance engineer position is a long time smoker and is close to emphysema and won’t give up the fags. I talk to him regularly and he often coughs up his guts while swigging a couple of glasses of vino. I think he might croak in the next few years but I don’t see him giving them up or even getting the patch as he is too far down that rabbit hole.
It is what it is!
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Ah, saltpetre. That’s another reason I switched to roll ups in the mid 90s. It’s wasn’t just price. But my job meant that I’d often have to put my cigarette down for a few minutes to deal with someone or something. I’d return to find a long cylinder of cold ash…
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The story goes that they added it to cigarettes to keep the libido of soldiers down and also added it to sugar on the troop ships. Later on they discovered it would allow cigarettes to smoulder the advantage being they could sell more of them.
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I intended to include in the above that another pal of mine who emigrated from Greece to Canada in the 70’s with $17 in his pocket told me that they used tobacco leaves as toilet paper back then which brings to mind that exclamation “this is really good sh!t”!
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Great. I’ve just reached nine years without a cigarette after 30 yrs of smoking, and i used to chain smoke and didn’t believe I could ever stop.
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