Long life
Confessions of a 60-a-day man
Nigel Nicolson
If your New Year's resolution is to stop smoking, find someone with a heavy cold and catch it. Even the most incorrigible addict will find it difficult to smoke during the first four rheumy days, and then he must steel himself not to resume. This was how I kicked the habit. I was a 60-a-day man until 1 January 1989, when a snorter of a cold, natural not induced, coincided with the New Year and an event that filled me with such shame that I determined then and there never to smoke again, and I haven't.
I was in a non-stop train from Bangor to Euston and ran out of cigarettes as we passed through Crewe. I was desperate. I walked through the carriages until I found a man with an unopened packet of Players beside him and I begged him to sell me six.
shall never forget the contempt with Which he tossed the entire packet at me, refusing payment. I had become a tobacco fiend. It was no longer an occasional plea- sure. It was a vice that in the double sense of the word held me in its grip. Then came the New Year and the coincidental cold. It was too great an opportunity to miss.
Long before this incident I had realised that smoking had become increasingly anti- social, especially in America. At a dinner- Party for 20 in Georgetown, Washington, not a single cigarette was smoked all evening, 18 of us because we did not want to, and two because we didn't dare. And When I asked a lady of 80 in her smart New York apartment whether she would mind if I smoked, she replied with old-world cour- tesy, 'To anyone else I'd say, please don't.' In Britain we have taken longer to catch UP. As a new-born abstainer I now realise how much offence I once gave. I am begin- ning to discover other people's smoke dis- agreeable. It was not so at the start. I would beg them to blow it in my direction so that I could enjoy it vicariously, and it was only six months ago when I entered by mistake the smoking compartment of my local train and was repelled by the accumu- lated fumes that I knew that I was finally cured.
What was it that I once so much desired? There was a physical need, that in my case was concentrated at the roof of the mouth and craved a titillation that could so easily be satisfied. There was also a mental solace in smoke that eased minor stresses like an awkward telephone call, a challenging newspaper article or an interview. It is curi- ous that I no longer feel the need for it Instead I find stimulus in sucking Polo mints, and have exchanged one addiction for another, resulting in less cost but greater girth.
hope that my abstention will last the rest of my life, but there have been other occasions when I lapsed. Once, after two Years of no smoking, 1 had to make a Speech in West Berlin before the Wall came down, and was so determined to give it everything of which I was capable that I lit a cigarette, then another, then another. It was six years before I stopped again. There is not a great deal that I miss, and much that I gain.
I save money; I need not worry when my stock of cigarettes runs low and the shops are closed; setting fire to my waste-paper basket is a risk removed; the fluffy clouds in an oil painting, since cleaned, will never turn brown again; I am once more socially acceptable. I suppose that I am healthier, but this is not a benefit I'd put high on my list because I'm barely aware of it. I never counted myself among the one-in-ten heavy smokers who will die of it. Maybe the blood does run cleaner and more limpidly. I hope so. It's the clot that kills, as we older men are always being reminded.
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