Smoking

By the age of twenty-one I was on sixty ciggies a day, having smoked since I was fourteen, like most people in their twenties, I was foolish enough to believe in my immortality so the prospect of lung cancer never entered the equation, but my enormous, mammoth-like beast of an ego prized my looks above all else, so eventually it was vanity which won out over addiction:
I had a habit of always having a ciggy hanging out of the corner of my mouth when my hands were occupied – typing – painting – whatever – and slowly but surely started to develop nicotine stains on the tiny hairs up my nose. Imperceptible to anyone else..but to me it looked like I’d been snorting cocoa. So the cigs had to go.
I stopped overnight. My greatest longing was not so much for the nicotine, but for all the accoutrements that went with it – my selection of fancy cigarette holders, the beautiful gold lighter I had been given by friends for my twenty-first birthday, the exotic brands of cigarette themselves, which I would mix and match as the fancy took me, calling in daily at a fabulous wee tobacconists in Saint Vincent’s Place in Glasgow, en route to University.
I was such a sucker for the beauty and promise of the product’s packaging, that during my roll-up-ciggy period, it was from that very tobacconists that I emerged with a packet of Three Castles, only to find, when I tried to roll and light my mishapen and disgusting fag – that I was attempting to smoke goddamn pipe tobacco.
So, everything was consigned to a drawer and then to a bin and despite a year-long laps in my thirties, I haven’t smoked since.
Yet, the most curious of things, all the longings I didn’t have for nicotine back then, have emerged on occasion in the here and now – usually late at night when talking and laughing with friends, but then I miss my glass of whisky too. Perhaps the urge is based more on reminiscence than need, like the smell of my mother’s perfume, or the hot car-leather of a summer holiday,vying with dad’s eighty a day habit billowing out of the offside window.
I’m wittering.
I’ll shut up now. :?

@Bad Manners wrote:

@~Tickled Pink~ wrote:

@chickenman wrote:

The UK will next week become the first European country to introduce graphic images on cigarette packets to warn about the dangers of smoking.
The 15 different images will include pictures of a diseased lung and heart surgery being performed.
They will start to be introduced on 1 October, but it will be another year before all packets contain them as existing stock will have to be sold.
Will it make any difference ?

No, it won’t make the slightest difference. Smokers will only learn when it is too late because most are very stubborn and ignorant.

Your intelligence level never starts to amaze me.

If Smokers wanna smoke let em smoke. They give huge amounts of revenue to the Country.
Stopping smoking is harder than kicking Heroin. It aint an easy thing to do.

You talk as if you know me, but you don’t so you do not need to comment on my intelligence. I am entitled to my opinion like everybody else, and if smoking is harder than kicking heroin so what? You shouldn’t have started in the first place. Congratulations on bringing in alot of the governments income, but then again it’s the tax payers who suffer when your dying in hospital. Oh and another thing I never once said smokers cannot smoke, let them by all means.
All I said in my last post was that pictures on cigarette packet will not make the slightest difference, but you obviously missed my point.

And you insult my intelligence? Oh yes you are quite right I am a ‘character’ I am bugs bunny if you must know.

I managed 6 months without. Had wine with friends rather than at home, one ciggy and within a week I was back on again.

Ive not tried to stop since, I need to be in that frame of mind where I want to stop and Im not anywhere near that at the moment.

Too weak innit.

I threw out all the cigarettes in the house, because of the kids.

One day I’ll get the lighters off ’em too.