When I stopped smoking on 31st December 1993, 27% of the UK population were smokers. That figure is now down to 15% or, to put it in a more positive context, 85% of Brits do not smoke. I always think, as I pass by a smoking area outside an office or pub, thank God that’s not me. It’s anti-social, it makes you smell, it costs a fortune. Literally a fortune. I worked it out.
On the basis of cigarettes costing £5 a packet (they were cheaper than that when I smoked, far more expensive today), my partner and I have saved, or not spent, something like £114,000 on cigarettes. That’s £114,000 of already taxed income. It could also be that it may have saved something else: my life.
I think about the family on my mother’s side. Let’s look at the evidence:
- Mum – a smoker whose circulation deteriorated in her fifties who spent the rest of her life in agony. She had heart trouble and eventually died of a massive heart attack.
- Uncle – a smoker who gave up too late and died of lung cancer.
- Grandfather – a smoker who died of lung cancer before I was born.
- Grandmother – a smoker who developed heart trouble and severe breathing problems which made her life horrible before she died.
- Mum’s cousin – a smoker who was forced to have major heart surgery at a relatively young age, which ended his career prematurely.
Bearing in mind my genes, my prospects of enjoying a long life were not good if I carried on with the consumption of tobacco. So, on 1st January 1994, along with my partner I quit, never to go back to the most addictive drug in the world.
We went ‘cold turkey’ in order to give ourselves the best possible chance of giving up cigarettes. I am so grateful that ‘vaping’ did not exist in the 1990s because for us it would have been a coward’s choice. It would have seen us still addicted to nicotine and we would be in touching distance of going back on the fags. But we made it. As decisions go, it was one of the best in my life.
It was when we gave up that we realised how anti-social we had been, smoking in the presence of others and generally stinking to high heaven. When we stopped smoking and our sense of smell recovered, it became clear how much the house stank, how much we stank from our breath to our clothes. We stank, it cost a fortune and it was killing us. In other words, we were literally committing suicide and paying vast sums in order to do it.
Where, we wondered in later years, did all that money go? We didn’t remember suddenly having all that extra money, something like £87 a week, but then, like Loyd Grossman, we looked at the evidence. It helped pay for nursery charges for our children. From 2000, when our youngest son was two, we had a foreign holiday every single year, sometimes with a week in Cornwall added on. We managed to decorate and renovate our little house. Looking back, I don’t see how we could have done any of that if we’d carried on smoking.
As a young man, I thought I would live forever. Smoking didn’t change that naive view. I would be the lucky one who didn’t develop heart disease or lung cancer. I had faith in my luck. It was absolute nonsense.
If I had known when I was younger what I know today, I would never have smoked at all. We are told, on the basis of current evidence, that the effects of smoking can disappear from our systems if we quit when we are young enough. But what if the science evolves, as science always does, and it turns out the damage caused when we are young stays with us forever? What if it turns out that vaping is not safe?
I’m an ex-smoker now, the worst sort of human being. I literally hate the smell of tobacco and having developed late onset asthma, if I pass through a smoke haze, I have to reach for my inhaler. Occasionally, I look at a smoker and think, “Do you know what you are doing to yourself? Have you ever been in a cancer ward or a coronary care unit (CCU)?” A smoker friend of mine was admitted to the CCU after a massive heart attack. When I visited him in hospital, he asked me how many in this ward smoked. “Half of them?” I asked. “All of us. And those two have just come back from having a fag outside the hospital.” Within the year, my friend was dead.
When I smoked, I managed to set to one side the reality that it might kill me and would almost certainly shorten my life. I was relatively young, still in my thirties. The thought of growing old could wait for tomorrow. But one day in 1993 I realised a simple truth: what if there was no tomorrow? What if my health deteriorated in my early fifties, as my mother’s did, as her mother’s did, as her brother’s did as her father’s did, as her cousin’s did? In my twenties, I had barely worried about tomorrow, never mind what mind what happened in a couple of decades.
In 1994, I was one of the 27%. In 2019, I am so grateful that I am not in the 15%. Given my family history, I might not have been here at all.
