Give up smoking today.

Today I will attempt to give up cigarettes for the twentieth time. Will I succeed?

Probably not, but it will not stop me from trying. I curse the day I picked up a cigarette offered to me by my friend at the time. I thought it was cool even though the bloody thing made me choke, cough, splutter and stink like an ashtray.

Like everything else in my life, I quickly developed a dependency with the evil little sticks. After leaving school I was probably smoking about ten a day and enjoying them. In my late teens I landed a job that required little thought but lots of brawn, many if not all of my co workers where heavy smokers and within a year so was I.

Over many years my smoking patterns have been somewhat bizarre, I have smoked everything from roll ups to a pipe but always in the middle of it all was twenty Benson And Hedges.  Cigars where also my thing, always lighting one after jumping out of a helicopter or an armoured personnel carrier, made me feel like a man, doing manly stuff.

I am no fool though; I know full well the dangers of smoking, yet there is a self-destructive streak in me that will not permit me to care about the future, as everyone’s has the same end game. I am going to need a better reason than cigarettes are going to kill you, life would kill me regardless of whether I smoke or not.

So why should I give up? Well right now I want to give up because I have finally matured and feel that although I am addicted to the nicotine, I do not need to set fire to my face every thirty minutes when I can chew on nicotine infused gum or get a fix from a 15mg inhalator, after all it’s the nicotine I am after, not after 50 or so carcinogens that reside in every cigarette.

Wish me luck readers, and I promise not to become one of them antismoking Nazis if I am successful.

Ed.