Quitting smoking-
Here’s how this author (finally) did it. This is what he learned about the best way to “stub out”.
The following written content by Toby Wiseman
The first cigarette was unremarkable, though no less memorable for that. Late afternoon, a dry autumn day in 1989. Me. James. Was it Rich? No. Must have been Graham. Squeezed between a dense hedgerow and an old stone wall by the church opposite school, we took turns to puff and splutter our way through the first tab of a Benson & Hedges 10-pack. I recall muted laughter, muffled coughs and prodigal plumes of blue smoke. Discarded copies of Penthouse scattered the ground, strewn with the burned ends of an empty box of Swan Vestas. We were not the first petty-delinquent 13-year-olds to enter into this rite of passage, nor would we be the last.
People often recall that initial acrid hit: the first burn of the trachea, the involuntary rejection of alien fumes. For me, it was the fear of being caught – the palpitating, excited sort of fear – that cleaves to the mind above all. I wasn’t really the defiant, mutinous kind. A good boy, in the main. Keen to please teachers, polite to parents, eager to get good grades. A place in the team. A part in the play. Crucially, I had always been brought up to think of smoking as a very bad thing. We all had, of course. But cigarettes littered my childhood. It had always been drummed into me not to do as family did. Defying that felt complicated.
Cigarettes become the toxic lover that you just can’t quit
Both of my grandfathers were serious smokers. The one I didn’t meet – Dad’s dad – was never without a gasper on the go. Every picture I have seen of him features the same filter less fag, deftly perched on his bottom lip. The enduring memory I have of my maternal grandfather is of a proud, awkward man, sitting in a corner armchair, silently doting on his grandchildren, with an ever-present Dunhill International staining his already yellowed and hardened fingers. Both of them died, eventually, of emphysema. When Mum met Dad, in the late 1960s, he had a very uncool “No smoking” sign hanging from the nearside door of his extremely cool, metallic-grey MGB. In 1971, aged 21, on the day of his father’s funeral, Dad began a committed, lifelong relationship with nicotine. He died at 67 of pancreatic cancer. If it’s not in the genes, it’s certainly in the constitution. Read more from Men’s Health.
