posted on 19 September 2007 12:57
by
James
Kicking the Habit - The Admission
First of all, let me congratulate you. By clicking on the links you have, you have put yourself among the elite few who read this blog.
And unfortunately I think the emphasis there should be on few – in the six weeks or so this blog has been online, it has been viewed a total of 14 times. I suspect around half of those are either by me or by people I know, so if you don’t fall into that category you can consider yourself even more special. Well done.
Anyway, as this blog began as a record of my efforts to give up smoking, I feel I ought to come clean: I haven’t given up.
No, I am still smoking. In fact I’m not even sure I’ve cut down. Okay, I haven’t.
I’m not even sure I ever really intended to. Giving up is tough, and surely practically impossible if you don’t actually want to quit.
I know I ought to, I don’t even especially enjoy smoking, but for some reason I still don’t really want to stop. I guess that’s what addiction is.
And besides, I’ve just returned from Majorca where I bought 10 50g pouches of Golden Virginia for just £30, so it looks like I’ll be carrying on for a while yet.
Buying tobacco in large quantities somehow makes smoking feel more disgusting. I’ve always felt slightly repulsed by the sight of people in supermarkets buying those massive 200-packs of Superkings or Embassy or whatever – it shows such commitment to the habit. But I guess the only difference for me is that I bought my baccy from a Spanish tobacconist, which is somehow more acceptable.
So there you have it, I am still smoking and I have no intention of maintaining the pretence that I’m giving up. Just don’t tell my mum.
Other people here in the Reporter office are having more success: one smoker has not had a cigarette since mid-August, while another has recently learned she’s pregnant and has therefore switched to patches. It means my cigarette breaks are lonely experiences, but hey, that’s what you get for smoking.
I will give up at some point, honest, but for now I will carry on killing myself slowly. I saw an article in The Sun on a 100-year-old woman who had been smoking for something like 80 years. And she wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. After all, nobody likes a quitter.