By Rab MacWilliam
It was like saying a final goodbye to one of my oldest friends, but it had to happen.
After forty years, with the odd minor interruption, my intimate relationship with fags has come to an end. My buddies had seen me through all sorts of good and bad times, and to find myself bereft of their comfort and unconditional love has left me inconsolable but determined to end my reliance on their devious charms.
The health issue was partly to do with my decision, as was the fact that they now cost over a fiver a pack (at least £10 a day in my case). But the cruncher – the final nail in the coffin, so to speak – was the announcement that, come this July, smoking is to be banned in all public places in England. And that includes public houses, where I do tend to while away some of my spare time. All right, all of my spare time. I had no intention of standing in the rain outside the Rochester Castle, puffing away and revealing to all the pathetic nature of my addiction and my inability to function properly without the regular chemical hit from what I am increasingly beginning to perceive is a noxious, filthy and anti-social habit (or so I keep telling myself).
Having no willpower whatsoever in these matters, I threw myself into the hands of the National Health Service and joined one of their Stop Smoking programmes. The sessions were held once a week in the convenient Roman Road in Bow, two buses and over an hour each way. But the journey in itself, I figured, was part of the therapy. If I didn’t really want to do it, would I give up four hours a week of my time? In situations like this you can convince yourself of anything.
There were six of us, in a converted church and under the guidance of a Health Worker from the Royal London Hospital. We ranged from a sweet old lady, who smoked two a day and clearly just wanted the company, to someone whose intake, incredibly, far exceeded mine. We were tested for the amount of carbon monoxide in our blood. Apparently, the normal non-smoker who lives and works in London has a reading of three. Mine was 27. That gave me a clue that things weren’t perhaps as they should be, and my excuse that I’d been sucking on the exhaust pipe of a 73 bus for the previous hour did not impress the Health Worker.
We were advised – but certainly not lectured on the fact – that smoking is not exactly up there with press-ups and circuit training, and that one out of every two smokers dies from smoking-related diseases. Ah, good, that’ll be the other one, I thought, in a brief moment of self-delusion. We were encouraged to continue smoking for the first two weeks of the eight-week long course, and then we had abruptly to stop after the third session, with the aid of nicotine replacements, if necessary. Naturally, I signed up for everything they had, except for anti-depressants, but I’ll probably also start taking them the way things are going.
The previous time I stopped smoking I lasted nearly eighteen months (this, of course, does not include Tom Thumb cigars), and the initial three-month nicotine patch treatment seemed to have worked. But once an addict, always an addict. I was taking off on a 747 from Heathrow to Los Angeles and suffered a serious panic attack. I high-tailed it to the nearest stewardess, demanded a pack of fags (you could smoke on planes in those days), and finished it by the time we were over Ireland. The rest of the journey passed in a fug of smoke and several miniatures of whisky. I was happy and home again. My sense of wholeness had returned, and the previous eighteen months, in retrospect, seemed like a bereavement.
You people who have never smoked cannot possibly understand the ravenous, evil nature of the beast. Junkies can come off heroin in a few days (albeit often painfully) but nicotine addicts have to live with it for ever. The drug itself is pretty much harmless, but the cravings, and the delivery system, are not. Nevertheless, I am now a resolute non-smoker assisted by the patches (which, incidentally, conjure up the most amazing psychedelic dreams). I threw away my last fags just before the Arsenal home European Cup game against PSV Eindhoven, although our dismal performance almost made me head straight back to the rubbish bin. I officially became a non-smoker on the following day, Ash Wednesday, which seemed to me an appropriately symbolic date.
‘We provide the anorak – you go out in the rain and climb the hill’, said the Health Worker, making me feel like a flawed but ultimately heroic Shakespearian figure. I intend to maintain this deluded self-image, but who knows? I’ll report back on progress next issue, either dictating it piously from my exercise bike, or from the Rochester, coughing away like the rest of them.
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