Giving Up Smoking

First the rock bottom. I was four years clean and I was almost chain smoking. My chest hurt, my hips hurt, my legs hurt, my hands hurt. I wheezed when I moved, spoke or drew breath and, like a latter day Dante by the banks of the Thames, was continually assailed by a disquieting orchestra of squeaks, sighs, moans and whistles. Images of waterlogged accordions and threadbare tar-logged bagpipes feebly played by a dying race in the sucking depths of a cooling tar pit beneath the dim yellow light of an exhausted star in some far-off forgotten universe loomed pointlessly, constantly, in my weary imagination. Why? I have no idea. (Nor have I any idea why I’ve included this sentence in this article. Forgive me. Delete it.)

If I ran even for a few paces it took me half an hour to recover. Any time spent lying in a horizontal position such as a nights sleep required a reciprocate feat of the magnitude of Lazarus’ rising merely to regain the vertical – I’m talking about getting up. Naturally, this would be punctuated by racking bouts of painful coughing and a rather unpleasant sensation of imminent death by drowning in a viscous ocean of phlegm. My clothes stank. My breath stank. My yellow teeth lent contrast and colour to the otherwise grey lunar landscape of my face – itself frozen in a rictus of anxiety beneath a permanently furrowed brow. The theatre, the cinema, restaurants, going out at all, relationships, children, trains, boats, planes, sex, in fact the whole of existence, life as we know it, seemed to me little more than an inconvenience, a cruel device of a malevolent power to separate me from smoking. Every thought or deed, every action or contemplation of same required the lighting of a ciggie. Even the lighting of a cigarette required the lighting of a cigarette.

So far so good. That is - all this amounted to little more than business as usual for an addict but recently retired from active service. In fact, almost the upside. I could have carried on that way for years if the nicoteine had continued to do its job of successfully suppressing any outbreaks of feelings. But of course, it didn’t. It stopped working. I used to dream of taping half a dozen Senior Service together in a vain attempt to recover that one satisfying whiff/drag/ blast/toke whatever that would make all the not-dissimiliar-to-forty-years-down-a-Welsh-mine-breathing-firedamp-and-coal-dust side-effects palatable.

But it was not to be. I had to give up but I could only do so when there was absolutely nothing left for me in that particular addiction. And even after that initial realisation it still took me two years. Two years marked by relapse sparked firstly by a friends generous Marlborough stumps left in the ashtray (obviously not a real nicoteine addict, man) smoked surreptitiously after he’d gone, six months on snuff (a massive nicoteine high lasting approximately point nought recurring of a nanosecond accompanied by the kind of pain known only to those rare souls who’ve had the misfortune and supreme unmanageability to snort citric acid by mistake in the dark confines of an elderly relative’s candlelit lavatory and had to explain the ensuing headstands performed in a stone sink beneath a Niagara-force cold tap as an obscure form of Crowleyan yoga – oh yes, and lest we forget, the ensuing nasal incontinence with its socially challenging tendency to produce sudden torrents of brown lava that cascade unheralded down the planes and slopes of the face usually in company under bright lights - something to do with the tension and the temperature)

and finally a year on nicorette – much like methadone once acclimatized to - which ended only in the Sahara desert when the incredible temperatures made it impossible to remove from its packaging ( like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly) and I eventually, finally surrendered. It was an incredible relief. That was eight years ago and I still marvel at the fact that I’m nicoteine free. It was and remains one of the clearest lessons – after the successful relinquishment of my primary addiction – in the efficacy of this programme. And also the humanity. I was told early on to give up smoking when I was ready and not before and that proved to be good advice.

Eventually, it seems, we all of us go everywhere in this journey of recovery but we do so to a beat that isn’t ours – to a clock we can’t control, thank God.