F-The Beer and Fags Diet:Chapter Five: Fags

CHAPTER FIVE

Fags

"Cross this stile and turning 30 degrees to your left cross the field
(to the left-hand end of the houses
you can see on the horizon). This will take you up to a plank bridge in
the hedge which you cross before
carrying on along the right-hand side of the next field. In the corner
you will find a more substantial
bridge which leads you to another field. Turn 30 degrees left again and
cross the field to come to a
kissing gate."

Since leaving the road I've been walking through watermeadows. There
are no
cattle around but it can't be because of foot and mouth because this
area wasn't
badly affected. There was only one cull round here and that was ten
miles away at
Chesterton. I'm hurrying now because I want to have a pint back at
Ickford before
it closes after lunch.

My dad spent most of his life trying to beat smoking. I've spent the
whole of my life
trying to stop. My dad's technique was the "gradually cut-down till
you've cut-down to
none" method. When I was a boy he'd buy packs of ten rather than
twenty, then carefully
count out each cigarette at the allotted time. Of course it never
worked, it's probably
never worked for anyone in the history of the world. I used to enjoy
counting the coupons
in the sideboard drawer and browsing through the Embassy catalogue to
see what we
could buy. I'd be pleased when he failed to stop as it meant I'd get
more coupons to play
with. I didn't know it was killing him. I've often wondered if I've
spent my life since he
died in subconsciously trying to emulate him. Like me, he spent his
life fighting beer and
fags. He died when he was forty-four. I'll be forty-four next
month.

I started smoking on a school exchange trip to France. It was 1973 and
I was 15. I stayed
with Boris Christmann and his elder brother Eric in Lyons. The events
of 1968 were still
fairly recent and they both claimed to be anarchists, but I didn't know
what they were
talking about. Boris's family lived in an apartment block on a hill
overlooking the
confluence of the Rhone and the Soane. I spent most of the three weeks
in Boris's
bedroom smoking untipped Gauloise and listening to Led Zeppelin
records. I don't know
why I started smoking, I suppose it was because Boris and Eric were
smoking and there
seemed no reason not to. In fact it seemed cool and great and to be
honest it still does.
Even if I'd known about the health and wealth risks it probably
wouldn't have stopped
me. The kids nowadays know all about the health risks and it doesn't
stop them. The fact
is that at fifteen you really really believe you're immortal. Death is
so far over the
horizon it never enters your head.

I didn't come out of the closet as a smoker until after my dad died. I
was in the sixth form
at school and I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom, doing my
homework. It may have
been the winter of discontent because there was a power cut and I was
using a gas picnic
stove for heat and candles for light. When my mum came into the room I
told her I
smoked. She said "You'd better not!" and that was it, I was an official
smoker. I would
never have dreamed of telling my dad but I knew my mum had no power or
authority
over me. I've often wondered why this was the case but I've never
really got to the
bottom of it. I suppose it was because authority is based in respect.
My dad was
intelligent and well-educated and I respected him. He was also a
six-foot police sergeant,
perhaps he naturally commanded respect. I wanted to be like him and to
be liked by him.
On the other hand, my mother was poorly educated, had no interest in
education and
would let me do whatever I wanted. I didn't have to work for her
devotion. Some people
might see this as a mother's normal unconditional love. Unfortunately,
whilst it's fine for
a young child to give unconditional love to a parent, a child needs
more in return than just
adoration. The episode described above is a typical example. "You'd
better not!" she said
and that was it. There was never another word on the subject. Where was
the explanation
as to why I shouldn't smoke? There should have been threats as to what
she would do if I
continued, and punishments when I did continue. I don't think she could
be bothered.

This was about the time that government health warnings started to
appear. The first ones
were tiny pamphlets exhorting us to smoke healthily (ha-ha). They were
quite a novelty
when they first came out. They were slipped into fag packets and said
things like "If you
must smoke, make sure you take your cigarette out between puffs."
Another one was "If
you must smoke, try and have small puffs instead of big puffs." We were
adolescents and
trying to cope with bodies full of newly arrived hormones, most of
which carried
homophobic tendencies. Oh how we laughed!

Even at that age I knew that it was impossible to stop smoking unless
deep down inside
you really wanted to. I remember saying as much to John Crowther's dad
at John's
seventeenth birthday party. I also said that I felt sure that one day I
would wake up and
really want to stop. I was right but it's not as simple as that. It is
true that you will not
stop unless you really want to, but it doesn't work the other way
round. The fact that you
really want to stop doesn't mean you will. I desperately wanted to stop
from my late
twenties when my health started going downhill, but it took me another
fifteen years. And
I'm not out of the woods yet.

By the end of university I was a hardened smoker on twenty a day. Three
years later at
my accountancy finals I was panicking about how I would get through the
exam papers
without a fag. I would stand outside the exam room with the other
smokers and gulp
down four fags in the ten minutes before the exam started, desperate to
get as much
nicotine into my bloodstream as possible, even though I knew it didn't
work like that.

On my first flight to Saudi I went to the galley where there were
several stewardesses and
asked if I could buy some duty-frees. They smirked condescendingly, as
British Airways
cabin staff were trained to do at the time. Eventually one of them took
pity on me and
explained that fags were cheaper in Saudi than at BA's duty-free price.
I didn't really
believe her, but when I got to Jeddah I found that fags were not only
cheaper but you also
got a free lighter with every two hundred. I was in smoker's heaven for
a while, but
eventually the OCD kicked-in big time. When this happened smoking just
became
another source of anxiety fuelling the OCD furnace. I smoked heavily at
the office and
would fill huge ashtrays with my fag-ends. At some point the ashtrays
would become so
full they would have to be emptied into a waste-paper bin. This was
disastrous for me as
it meant that before leaving the office I would have to stare at the
bin for five or ten
minutes to make sure all the cigarettes were extinguished and weren't
going to ignite the
paper in the bin. I know that this sort of behaviour may seem
ludicrous, but then you've
probably never suffered from OCD. Between waking every morning and
leaving for the
office I would smoke three or four fags. With checking all the ashtrays
for smouldering
cigarettes, making sure all the electrics were off, and checking all
the gas rings were out,
it would take me twenty minutes from starting my leaving ritual to
getting out of the villa
door.

My first serious attempt to stop was when B and I went on holiday to
Portugal in 1989.
We had a private villa with a swimming pool on the Algarve between
Carvoeiro and
Rocha Brava. I spent the days lying by the pool either reading "The
Easy Way to Stop
Smoking" by Allen Carr or listening to a stopping smoking self-hypnosis
tape. These two
were surprisingly effective. I managed to brainwash myself into
stopping. Every night
when we walked into Carvoeiro for dinner I would see people putting
those little white
sticks into their mouths and blowing out smoke and I would think how
ridiculous they
looked. Unfortunately, by the end of the evening I looked even more
ridiculous. After so
many years of smoking I now had nothing to do with my hands and
consequently I was
forever lifting my glass up to my mouth. I ended up completely smashed
every night.

At that time I was still quite a nervous flyer and I was dreading the
flight home, but I
made it without a fag and I even managed to last for a few weeks back
at work.
Unfortunately, as I've already said, it's impossible to stop unless you
really want to, and I
don't think I did want to. If you do somehow manage to stop for a while
you'll soon
rationalize why you've got to start again. My excuse came when I was
promoted to
European Treasury Manager. I had to fly to Frankfurt to take over the
position from a
German who'd screwed it up and was working his notice. Whether you
agree with me
that this was a stressful situation or not, it certainly wasn't
anything that couldn't be
handled without cigarettes. But for me it was a godsend, the perfect
excuse, how could I
possibly face such a scenario without the help of my little white
friends? I started
smoking again.

Years passed and I lost count of the number of times I'd chucked a
half-full packet of
fags out of the car window vowing never to touch them again. Within an
hour I would be
puffing away, having rationalized beyond any possible argument why it
was absolutely
necessary for me to smoke. In due course, having had some limited
success with
relaxation and self-hypnosis I decided to give a real live hypnotist a
chance. At this time
we were living in Buckinghamshire and I phoned a woman I'd found in the
Yellow Pages
who lived just off the M40 near High Wycombe. It was a truly remarkable
experience. I
strongly urge everyone to try hypnosis, not necessarily to stop smoking
but just for the
sake of the hypnosis itself. I arrived at her house and we went into a
dimly lit room with
low music playing. I sat in a recliner chair and in a soft voice she
gently put me into a
trance. There are lots of misconceptions about hypnotism. For instance,
I didn't lose
consciousness and I'm sure I remember everything that happened, but I
felt more relaxed
than I'd ever felt in my life. When she came to the part where she had
to stop me
smoking it felt like she was burning the words into my spine in
pokerwork, but without
any pain. When it was over I thought I'd been in a trance for about ten
minutes. When I
looked at my watch I found I'd been under for an hour. I felt
terrific.

It didn't work but that was partly my fault. I'd stupidly arranged the
session for the
evening before I started a new job where I knew the office would be
non-smoking. By
lunchtime next day I was out in the car park with ten Silk Cut,
wondering why I was
lighting up again.

Nevertheless, my interest in hypnotism had been aroused and I was sure
there was
something there that could help me with my smoking. A couple of years
later I tried it
again, this time in a squalid office in a run-down suburb of Swindon.
The hypnotist was a
seedy middle-aged man wearing a sports jacket. It worked for a couple
of months, but
then I started having the odd cigar in the pub, and before I knew it I
was back on twenty a
day.

I felt that the missing element was that of on-going support. On each
previous occasion
when I left the hypnotist I felt fine and terrific and couldn't wait to
face my fag-free
future. Then over the following days and weeks my enthusiasm and
confidence slowly
seeped away. At that point I wanted to go back to the hypnotist for a
top-up, but both of
them had told me that it was a one-hit technique, that it would work
after just one session
or it wouldn't work at all, and that was that. This point is
interesting, because by saying
this they are turning away the chance to earn money from repeat visits.
To turn down
clear money-making opportunities like this means that they are either
extremely altruistic
and morally pure or they are pitching their marketing at a different,
more subtle level. It
could be that they consider the punter is much more likely to make a
commitment to a
one-off session for fifty quid than a three session course for a
hundred and fifty quid. You
also have to remember that both these hypnotists came up with weak
excuses why they
wouldn't give me a tape of the session or of themselves. I have found
self-hypnosis quite
useful and I really can't think of a good reason why they shoudn't have
let me have a tape
other than to get me to return to them and pay for a further session.
Maybe they aren't
that altruistic after all.

I should have learned my lesson by now but I decided to give hypnotism
one last chance.
I went to a woman in another squalid Swindon office. This time I
explained that I was
happy to book several sessions so that she could provide me with
on-going support.
However, I can't have explained it very well because she thought I
meant support prior to
stopping rather than afterwards. She must have thought she'd won the
jackpot and I
couldn't be bothered arguing. All that happened was that I had two
preparatory sessions
then the same final session I'd had from the previous therapists. The
only difference was
that I paid three times as much.

This time I stayed clean for a few months. As on previous occasions, I
kept up the
pretence of having stopped for a long time after I'd re-started. The
fact that nicotine can
make you behave like this is probably the worst aspect of nicotine or
any other drug
addiction. At this point you are already a slave to your addiction, you
are pitied or
despised by your friends and colleagues and your health is
deteriorating. But you can't
face the shame and the look in your wife's eyes when she realizes
you've failed again, so
you lie in the face of your closest and dearest loved ones, those who
mean more to you
than anyone or anything else, except of course, smoking. By now any
shred of self-
respect you've managed to cling on to is utterly destroyed and replaced
by self-loathing.
Someone who has never been a drug addict can't begin to understand, but
when you get
to this level you're just about at rock bottom. I used to buy packets
of ten rather than
twenty as they were easier to hide. I used to keep them in secret
little hidey-holes around
the house and B never did find them. A favourite place was behind the
wash basin in the
downstairs toilet. I would make up excuses to go to the shop or
post-box then nip into the
loo and put the fag packet and lighter down the front of my trousers.
Then I'd go out on
my errand, have a quick fag or two, and return to the house sucking
mints so that no-one
would smell anything suspicious. If I'd been out in the car I'd have
had to smoke with the
window open because of the stink. I used to make excuses to go to the
pub by myself so
that I could smoke. In fact I used to look forward to all the times
when I had to be apart
from my family so that I could smoke without them knowing. Of course,
all my mates
and most of B's friends knew I was smoking, but B didn't. It was
pathetic and degrading.
Of course I would have denied it, but in retrospect it's quite clear
from my actions alone
that this fucking bastard drug was more important to me than my wife
and children. This
is what nicotine does to you. Welcome to Marlboro Country.

I became so practiced at this deceit that I once kept it going for
years. During this time I
used to dread family holidays as I would be with the wife and kids all
day and not get
many chances for a quick drag. I would wake up every morning and my
first thought
would be about how I was going to get that day's nicotine. Against all
the odds I got
away with several annual holidays without being caught. I also used to
dread social
events. I would sneak to the loo or round a corner and try and get a
complete fag down
my neck in three big lungfuls so that my absence wouldn't be noticed or
questioned.

With each new winter the tightness in my chest became worse and my
breathing became
more laboured. I knew that every year my health was progressively
failing and that it was
caused by smoking. My biggest scare came one summer in the late
nineties. I'd just
returned from a round-the-world business trip. I'd flown from London to
Denver to
Seattle to Tokyo and continued west to London, all in the space of ten
days. I'm a poor
traveler and I arrived home physically and mentally shattered. Then I
started to get pains
in my neck and throat and I found it difficult to swallow. I knew it
wasn't a sore throat, it
just didn't feel like one. In those days when no-one else was around I
would slip out to
the garage for a smoke. One Sunday afternoon I stood smoking in the
garage doorway,
contemplating my situation. I knew I had throat cancer. It felt like
throat cancer. Oh boy,
I'd really gone and done it this time, I wasn't going to be able to
talk myself out of this
one. I resigned myself to my death, to leaving my children without a
father and my wife
without a husband, to not seeing my children grow up. It was all
because of smoking.
And I stood there with a cigarette in my hand.

The next day I went to see my doctor. My voice shook as I explained my
symptoms and
concern. He felt the glands in my neck. "No swelling there," he said in
his soft Borders
accent, "so I shouldn't worry yourself about cancer." I nearly wept
with joy and relief. He
took a swab of my throat for analysis and two days later phoned to say
I had a throat
infection. I'd probably picked it up during my trip whilst breathing
the filthy, recycled,
bug-ridden muck that airlines pass off as air. So I got away with it.
In fact there was
never anything to get away with. You probably think I made a great big
fuss about
nothing, but it's how your mind works when you're a paranoid nicotine
addict.

When I did eventually stop it came right out of the blue. By now I'd
been studying my
smoking habit for twenty-five years and at the end of this time I was
no nearer to an
understanding of why I did it. I had given up the hard stuff and was
smoking ultra-low
cigarettes with hardly any nicotine or tar. So why was it so difficult
to even consider
stopping? Despite what people think, it's not because of the terrible
nicotine withdrawal
symptoms. These aren't terrible at all. The nicotine levels in your
bloodstream halve
every hour, so if the physical withdrawal symptoms of nicotine were so
bad then no
smoker would ever be able to sleep through the night. I didn't smoke to
have something
to do with my hands and mouth. If that was it then there'd be no reason
to light the
cigarette. Smoking doesn't aid concentration, it destroys it when your
mind interrupts you
to say you need a fix. Smoking doesn't take away boredom. If I had a
fag because I was
bored I wouldn't even realize I was smoking it, the fag would be down
to the end before I
knew it was there. As Winston Churchill said about Russia, my addiction
remained a
riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Then I read a book called "The Only Way To Stop Smoking Permanently" by
Allen Carr.
I'd read his previous book, "The Easy Way To Stop Smoking", and even
though it didn't
work for me it made a lot of sense. But "Easy Way" was a slim tome for
nancy-boy
smokers. The "Only Way" was four hundred and fifty pages of dense
prose. This was the
one for the battle-hardened cynic like me.

If Allen Carr were an Olympic ice skater he would get 5/5 for technical
merit and 0/5 for
artistic merit. His writing style is appalling and his constant use of
Americanisms is
particularly irritating. However, literary merit is hardly the point,
these books are about
stopping smoking. Carr is the only person I've ever come across who has
a truly deep
understanding of smoking and his technique for stopping is extremely
effective. Put very
simply he explains that the physical withdrawal symptoms are
insignificant, it's the
psychological fear of the perceived physical withdrawal symptoms that's
the problem.
But as he's already explained, these symptoms are insignificant. Now,
if you think this is
going round in circles then you're dead right. His technique works by
repeatedly showing
time and time again that there are no withdrawal symptoms and by
demolishing every
reason a smoker could ever have for continuing to smoke, and therefore
showing that
there is nothing to be scared of when you do stop. It amounts to
de-brainwashing then re-
programming but who cares, it really works. About one third of the way
through "The
Only Way" I ran out of fags and didn't bother buying any more. This was
at one of the
most stressed periods of my life, just before the New York meeting that
sealed my fate,
when my career was collapsing in ruins around me. Allen Carr must feel
good knowing
he's saved thousands of lives. I only made one mistake, I failed to
follow his strict
instruction not to substitute cigarettes with something else, and now
I'm hooked on
nicotine gum. Who cares, it's better than dying.

Like many people I can remember exactly where I was when I learned
about the
Lockerbie disaster. I was parking my car outside a McDonalds in
Birmingham when I
heard radio reports of fireballs falling out of the sky where there
should've been a jumbo
jet. This atrocity caused untold misery to the families of those who
lost loved ones and
sparked a worldwide manhunt. The bombing took place over a decade ago
and the
culprits have only recently been brought to justice. Around two hundred
and fifty people
died at Lockerbie. Consider for a moment then that around three hundred
people die
every day in Britain from smoking. Why don't we hear so much about this
scandal? Why
is this atrocity not on the front page of every newspaper? The grief
and desolation caused
by this obscenity is even greater than that caused by Lockerbie, and it
happens every
single day, so where is the worldwide manhunt for the killers? It's
thought that around six
thousand people died in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers,
sparking a potential
world war. Six thousand deaths? Pah! Peanuts! We can rack up six
thousand deaths in the
UK just by smoking for twenty days.

Who's to blame? Well of course the tobacco companies can take their
share. Never ever
underestimate the depths to which these bastards will sink. Many years
ago in the United
States there was some sort of very high level government investigation
into smoking. The
big issue at the time was whether nicotine was addictive or not. The
top men at each of
the big tobacco companies were asked to stand in front of the court and
swear that they
did not believe nicotine to be addictive. Each of these men knew that
their companies had
carried out research that proved conclusively that not only was
nicotine addictive, but that
smoking caused lung cancer. I have seen a film clip where these men
rose one by one in
front of the court and swore "I do not believe that nicotf
global warming really does exist, or are the doom-mongers all just in
it for their own
self-importance. Probably. The sea is powerful. The wind is powerful.
Mountains
are powerful. Mankind just isn't.

Why aren't old people scared of dying? I'm only forty-four and I'm
bloody terrified. I'm
sure other people of my age feel the same. I'm more scared of dying now
than when I
was say twenty-five, and I was certainly more scared of dying at
twenty-five than when I
was twelve, an age when you don't believe in death. This appears to be
empirical
evidence that the fear of dying increases with age. If my fear of dying
increases linearly
as I get older then by the time I'm seventy-five I'll be grabbing
people by the lapels and
shouting in their faces. "I'm seventy-five! Don't you realize I'm going
to die soon? For
God's sake do something!" If I ever make eighty-five I'll be so rigid
with fear I won't be
able to move.

So why don't all our pensioners shuffle round panicking all the time?
How come they are
so much calmer about an event to which they are now so very close, yet
an event which
scared them when they were so many years away? What happens between
forty-four and
eighty-five to bring about this change? I don't know. Maybe it's
something to do with
seeing your children grow up and produce grandchildren. Maybe some
fools take comfort
from religion. Or maybe they just grow tired. I really would like to
know the answer to
this. I need to put my mind at rest about how I will feel as I grow
old. I suppose the best
thing I could do would be to ask a pensioner, but it's not really the
sort of conversation
you strike up at a bus-stop.

The positive side of dying is that I quite enjoy planning for my own
funeral. Your funeral
is your big chance to make a last great, glorious statement about your
tastes, your
opinions and your beliefs, and it's a statement that, once made, no-one
can take away. It
really is just such an annoying pig that you won't be there to enjoy
it. I've always known
with certainty that I want to be buried and not cremated. Even years
ago when I lived in
Saudi Arabia I made B promise that if anything happened to me she would
ship my body
home to be buried in England. I don't really know why I feel like this,
I suppose it's
purely down to one's own personal tastes. Or maybe it was the influence
of Rupert
Brooke's "The Soldier" which I learned by heart when I was fourteen.
When I discuss
this subject with friends they tell me they don't know how I could live
with the thought
of worms eating their way through my eyeballs. Well chums, personally
I'd prefer
maggots in my guts to the stench of burning flesh in the roasting-pits
of hell. Anyway, I
could always get a lead-lined coffin.

The funeral service itself might be a little more problematical. My
family are not
particularly religious, but neither are they particularly original
thinkers and I'm sure they
would wish and expect my funeral to take place in a church. Even I have
retained some
residual sentiment, nagging away at me inside, that I should
acknowledge this particular
rite of passage in the time honoured way. But I'm an atheist, I don't
believe in God and I
do believe in honesty. Wouldn't it be hypocritical to have a church
service when I've
spent my life blaming organized religion for all the sins of the world?
We've got a nice
little orchard at the back of our house. Couldn't we just hold a quiet
and dignified
humanist service in the village hall and then bury me under an
apple-tree? After all,
weddings can take place almost anywhere these days, why can't
funerals?

I'll probably chicken out and have it in a church. If so I'd like it to
be St Margaret's in
Oakley. That's if they'll have me after I've not set foot in there for
decades. I'd better
make sure I die at the right time as well. The congregations are so
small nowadays that
one vicar covers several parishes and each parish only hosts a service
every few weeks.
In the winter they close the churches down completely.

Either way, church or village hall, I would like two pieces of music at
the service. The
first will be "Days", written by Ray Davies but performed by Kirsty
McCall. This will
simply be a thank you to my wife and children. I'm presuming of course
that like most
men I will die before my wife. The other piece will be Jupiter from
Holst's Planets. I
would prefer this to "I Vow To Thee My Country", though I would hope
the words to the
hymn would still have a resonance with the congregation. This is not
because of the
patriotic first verse, though I am fiercely patriotic and this verse
would not be out of
place. Rather it would be for the words of the second verse. What
better reminder could
we want that there is something greater for mankind to aspire to? What
more beautiful
words are there than "and her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her
paths are peace."?

Then everybody could go down to the Chandos and get pissed. I want a
big party with all
the village invited. I want singing and dancing with loads of good
quality food and only
the finest real ale. I hope Pete is still serving Adnam's Broadside
when I go.

If I'm very rich when I die I'll leave a little money so my remaining
mates can have the
"Andy Pickering Memorial Curry and Piss-Up" every year. It would be
great if there was
after all an afterlife. I'd love to look down from on high each year
and see how the
number of attendees had diminished through death or apathy. Ah sod it.
I'm going to
outlive the lot of them. There ain't going to be no Memorial Curry and
Piss-Up.

There's nobody about at all. I haven't seen a living soul all morning.
It's Wednesday
so all the wheelie bins are outside the front gates, waiting for the
dustbinmen.

CHAPTER ENDS

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