Quitting me Quitting you – A Pseudo Sympathetic Guide to Quitting Smoking
New Year, new health binge. Nicolas Payne-Baader considers the agonies of giving up. Happy nicotine memories and why oh fuckin’ why do those black and white classics make smoking so seductively cool??
I am writing this in late November, eight days after my last cigarette. There’s no way to sugar to the pill, smoking is a hard thing to quit - it’s undeniably a fun thing to do there’s no getting around that.
Just watch some Goddard, it’s impossible that Belmondo wouldn’t have been having a nice time smoking his cigarettes and swanning about the south of France with Anna Karina. He wasn’t worried about the long term health effects of smoking, no one was. John Wayne wasn’t, Audrey Hepburn wasn’t, Marlon Brando definitely fucking wasn’t so it seems like such a ball ache to have to be the responsible adult in your own life and tell yourself that in fact smoking is not as much fun as it looks on other people or at least it isn’t all of the time.
The problem is that if I only smoked when I was on a beach or driving down a country road or sitting in a Parisian bar it would be fine, but my life doesn’t really revolve around those places. Everyone is ostracising smokers so quickly that you can hardly smoke in any of those places now anyway. Which is why quitting in the winter is actually quite a bit better, you can avoid the evening after evening sat in the cold outside a pub or having to go out at about 10 o’clock in the morning. Standing in the freezing cold having a cigarette has nothing to do with enjoyment and everything with appeasing a nagging feeling in your brain that knows that you’ll be in a foul mood if you don’t have a one even though it’s making you feel bad. And after you’ve had it you feel a little nauseous and a little dizzy and a little disappointed in yourself. Those are the cigarettes I don’t want, those are the cigarettes I don’t think anyone wants. I also don’t think anyone really wants to cough as much as smokers do, even if you get so used to it you sort of assume that everyone has a low level constant cough which isn’t really true.
It’s just very annoying that cigarettes are so bloody moorish and apparently it’s not as easy to pick and choose which ones you want, definitely not as easy as it is when you first started, standing with the cool kids which was great (I started smoking properly at 14). You ask someone for a cigarette you’re all smoking, it’s quite rebellious and then you sort of are one of the cool kids because you’re there with them having a fag. Being off your face outside a club and enjoying a cigarette like it’s manna from bloody heaven is pretty great; or coming out of the sea after a long swim and grabbing a cigarette sitting in the sun on a hot beach. Those are moments I would never take back and I would never try and tell a cigarette that it didn’t add to those experiences, that would be false and it would be cruel. However to be completely honest, there are a lot more soggy Rizla roll ups in my slippers on a damp morning or the nipping out to the cold at work moments and they really outweigh the others. You just don’t seem to be able to have ups without the downs. So even if it’s a bit unfair on the good ones, I had go and buy some Nicorette patches (really surprisingly effective, thought hardest part was definitely forcing myself into buying them) and kick the cigarettes all together. I enjoyed it though, smoking really does have its moments. You just have to put up with a lot of bad moments and it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore. 