Shamelessy picking up from the ailments post below, I thought it would be interesting to examine the smoking history of our demographic, not given least the long and usually amicable relationship between music and drugs. Tobacco, neat or with added, was well nigh an essential when some of our grizzled and motley crew were cutting their teeth and choosing their chops. Not asking for US presidential-style I never inhaled cop-outs, or indeed about anything other than non-waccy baccy. This is narco free admissions time. So, here goes. I’m the clean-living representative, never fancied it, never did it, some luck I raise probably too many glasses to, in a likely swing and roundabout, but so far, hic, so good.
You?
Gaspin’ for a gasper?
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From my mid teens to my early 40s, various amounts depending on the time and place, but I pretty much always smoked roll your own Drum. By the time I stopped the smallest pack of baccy would last me over a week, rolled into a few matchstick thin rollies per day. I quit 5 or 6 years ago, and now it’s odd to remember that I smoked for most of my adult life. I can’t say I feel any better for stopping, because to be honest I felt pretty good before.
I quit by using e-cigs for a few months, and stopped using those when I had a heavy cold and didn’t want to inhale anything other than air. Do some anti-smoking campaigners still say that e-cigs are bad because they mimic smoking too closely? Utter bollocks if they so say that; that’s what makes them such a great invention.
What really made me stop was meeting The Light, whose adored mother was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer. What I needed was someone to give up for; my smoking didn’t bother me but I knew it worried her, and that’s something I couldn’t bear.
For nearly three years at the end of the nineties I told myself that this half-ounce of Old Holborn would be the last tobacco I would ever buy…. nearly every time I bought it.
I do not judge addicts of any kind.
After 30 years of smoking I went to vaping about 18 months ago. I am enjoying the fact that I don’t have to have a whole fag each time – don’t have to go outside – can do it in the car – and it doesn’t stink.
I was never a heavy smoker – perhaps 3 a day. Towards the end of my smoking I asked my family doctor whether light smoking was really *that* bad. Aren’t I, effectively, a non-smoker? I asked. He replied that this would be similar to saying that you’re only a “little bit of a paedophile”. In other words, smoking in any way, is really really bad.
The last time I saw a doctor I was still a smoker and was asked about it (it seems to be a standard question for any medical consultation regardless of the reason for the appointment). When I gave an honest account she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Well, that’s not going to kill you.’ Which struck me as unexpectedly relaxed view from a medical professional.
I grew up in a fug of ciggy smoke and my dad was a doctor !
Apart from pinching a few fags and trying out when a lad, I have never felt the urge but other smokers don’t really bother me. I still find it hard to believe there used to be smoking rooms in hospitals and offices in the mid 80s were full of smokers.
And the rest. The last full-time job I had was in a no-holds-barred smoking office and that was still going strong when I left in 2000.
I gave up when I left school at 16. I did try a pipe for a couple of weeks but that was during my (short) Sherlock Holmes phase. I have seen too many smoker family members hospitalized because of breathing difficulties for me not to be anything but anti-smoking now. I accept free choice but celebrate when I see the steady decline of tobacco sales.
Smoked from mid teens to mid thirties, mainly roll ups. Like Gatz, I gave up when I met my wife. Don’t miss it at all.
A heavy smoker all my life – small pack of Golden Virginia per day and 40 Marlborough Light per day when working/living in Miami.
Three years ago discovered vaping and have not have a fag since.
The Vaping naysayers almost always have a vested interest, overt or otherwise. Ignore them.
In the future e-cigs will be recognised as one of the iconic designs of this century.
I smoked from being 18 for twenty years, I could easily get through 30 a day, more than 40 if I was on a night out. Towards the end I was rolling my own and a 2 ounch (50g) pouch would only last 3 or 4 days so I suppose I was a heavy smoker.
I quit on 31st January 2001 after several aborted attempts in the past. The date was picked because it wasn’t significant, for the first time I wasn’t trying to quit because of the amount of money it was costing and my wife quit at the same time. I used nicotine patches for about 3 weeks (the dreams I was having while wearing the patches were quite alarming), I also used Allen Carr’s “Easy Way To Stop Smoking” book and found it very helpful. I did pile on the weight however, I now realise that I often missed meals so I could have a smoke at break times – fifteen minute teabreak = 2 cigarettes, 30 minute lunch break = ciggie, sandwich, ciggie. I’d roll 3 cigarettes for the 40 minute drive to work, for me it was clunk, click, spark up and drive away, after 10 miles I lit the second and I knew exactly where to light the third so I was putting it out just as I reached work.
It was only after I quit that I realised how much smoking had shaped my daily routines, I often wonder how I’d cope with being a smoker now that there are so many restrictions on it.
I have wondered if declining rates of smoking have led to increased rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and so on. If people smoke because of an oral fixation (unfashionably Freudian, but go with it) then they will need something else to put in their mouths and food is the obvious first resort. I remember when my dad quit, at about the same age that I did, and started going through several packs of polo mints a day instead for a few months, which led to him losing the few teeth he had left by then.
It’s not just the mouth, it’s the hands. When you’re not smoking what the hell are you supposed to do with them? For a few years I think I ended up flapping mine about* like I was trying to get rid of a wasp.
(*steady)
My wife’s first husband did a lot of research on whether nicotine was addictive. He reckoned that smoking is as much habit as addiction to nicotine. I never met him but I reckon there’s a lot of truth in it.
The writer Peter Tinniswood was famously a pipe-smoker. When he finally gave up late in life – too late, alas – he was surprised to find that he realised that he had been addicted not so much to the nicotine as to the whole rigmarole of filling the pipe*.
(*I said steady!)
I has cause to type the words “pipe organ” yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed doing so.
I did that time, too.
Small pleasures are the best, as I keep telling Mrs M.
After about 25 years of smoking for England I gave up in 1990, my present to my mother on her 70th birthday. So I haven’t had a fag for 26 years, crikey.
I promise myself I’d take it up again on my own 70th birthday if I felt like it, but I absolutely don’t. (See health thread for self-inflicted ailments.) I feel terrible about what I put my family and friends through, not to mention people I shared an office with. And until the Kings X fire I was smoking on the tube too. (Along with loads of other people, obviously.)
I would like a toke now and again, but that’s no longer an option. Pain in the bum having to cook every time ;-(
An old lady (90-odd), a patient in the “Ambulance” TV series, revealed to the paramedic who was treating her after a fall that she took up smoking at 80 years of age in order to lose weight.
After inhaling my parents’ smoke for the 18 years I lived at home, I took up smoking myself from age 22 to 27. About a packet a day.
I stopped on April Fools Day 1981. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get a doctor to come and give me an injection of Ventolin. I was terrified. A few years later I started taking asthma medication, which I still take daily, carry a Ventolin inhaler which I hardly ever use.
Also, I could never smoke anything else. Got a bit silly inhaling others’ smoke once or twice.
I was given a Wills Woodbine when I was about 9 and was heartily sick. That pretty much did it for me as far as smoking was concerned in later life although I did have a brief flirtation with Consulate (‘cool as a mountain stream’) in my teens.
My first fag was a Consulate. I was sick.
Minty fresh vomit! Saves you brushing your teeth…
Cool as a mountain spring – blargh!
Like smoking Polo mints.
Tried desperately to take up smoking as a lad because in those days it was the only way to look cool ie attract girls. After being sick for the nth time I gave up and instead used my good looks to attract them girls. It was a lonely life….
Same thing with smoking joints, cough puke cough, then I discovered water-pipes – I was the world’s worst stoner, didn’t stop giggling for nigh on twenty years.
I started when I was 18 and smoked off and on till 6 years ago, when I gave up full time. I did give up for 4 years in the 80s then stupidly started again. I only smoked rollies and only in the evening – my first job, in ’82, allowed smoking in the office but I was the only smoker in the bit I was in and the rest of the team impressed upon me their displeasure at my tabs so I gave up smoking during the day, and rarely did for all the time I smoked. Generally I was a 5 a day (evening man) but it was creeping up and finally I gave up because I realised it was entirely driven by habit and I didn’t even enjoy it half the time. Three days after definitively giving up I had serious pangs at about 11.00 at night and ransacked the house searching for some baccy, didn’t find any and woke up in the morning so pleased I hadn’t. Haven’t fancied one since. It really fucked up my singing voice which has never recovered, and wasn’t lovely to start with. I like to think it sounds “worn”.
Never fancied it. My dad had quit when I was small, but used to have one occasionally, I remember him looking forward to a cigar on holiday. He smoked it, then promptly threw up which put me right off. Always despised the smell, can’t believe I spent nearly 30 years in pubs breathing in other people’s smoke. Disgusting, selfish, life shortening habit.
I’m another in the “never smoked” category. Dad did, I hated it never wanted to. Had no problem saying no if peer pressure ever kicked in.
I tried it in my teens, threw up a couple of times and decided it wasn’t for me. I did the same with booze, threw up many times and decided it was for me.
Because this is the Afterword, there has to be a link to a YouTube file…so here it is.
I never smoked, was never tempted etc, but loved (and still do) the music they used in Dunhill TV commercials. Here’s a five-pack. Note the reference to “the gentle art of smoking”….what else could it be?
(And the last one was obviously made after TV tobacco advertising had got the bullet – they never mention cigarettes, but extol the wonders of “the most distinguished tobacco house in the world.”)
Smoked my first cigarettes when I was 7 (stolen from my dad) and was very sick. Started smoking simultaneously with leaving school (at 16) and then gave it up after about a year. Started again when I got into smoking pot (about 17) and continued smoking both joints and cigarettes until I was about 40, when I gave up both. Was offered a cigar at my brother’s 40th birthday do in October 1994 and foolishly (drunkenly) accepted. It was really disgusting. I have not smoked since.
In the early 1990s I used to have frequent arguments with a heavy-smoking work colleague with whom I car-shared. When it was his turn to drive I kept my window open and put up with his smoke but I would not let him smoke at all in my car when I drove, no matter how hard he argued. He could not grasp the fact that even with his window open, my car would have got smoky and I wasn’t having that.
I’ve never touched them – not even as an experiment. My dad was a heavy smoker, and it killed him, throat cancer at the age of 55 (younger than I am now, which makes me feel positively prehistoric). Watching a parent die slowly and painfully is surely enough to make anyone avoid the disgusting stuff.
I gave up smoking 21 years ago this month, having been hospitalised with appendicitis. When I was well enough to get out of bed, I found the smoking room in the hospital, which smelt like all the unemptied ashtrays in the world lumped together, which put me off lighting up, and convalescing at my Mum’s, initially, and then at my then-partner’s, neither of whom smoked, it seemed wrong to spark up, so effectively I went cold turkey for just over a fortnight, and haven’t smoked since. There are times when I fancy a fag, but it’s a fleeting pang. If I get to 100 not out, and the GLW , a fervent non-smoker, has already departed, I might take smoking back up. What’s to lose at that age?
Leonard Cohen famously jested he might take up smoking again when he hit 80. Of course, he now is of that age and seems a little sensitive about whether he did, with some evasion around the fact he has a gasper on the go on his new LP cover. Son Adam, who produced the recording seems to suggest, with rather more candour, that indeed he did.
Peripherally on subject, I note that Cohen is at risk of losing his oldest chart buster in town crown, if Chuck Berry actually delivers his promised latest next year. I recall the brouhaha when John Lee Hooker’s Healer came out because he was an ancient in his 70s. Hell, the whole line-up of several bands hits that effortlessly these days.
I had my first cigarette aged 12 & was addicted by the age of 16, smoking 20/day until 14th December 1989. By then, I had a six month old son.
I gave up on Millennium Eve, but I miss it, I still smoke ‘socially’*, and if I live long enough, I plan to start again full-time.
* i.e. hardly ever
For those of you who have tried, tried and tried again, failed and have the means, book a same day return flight to Dubai.
Whilst waiting for your return flight visit the departure lounge smoking room. Inhale. Permeate your clothes. Rub your eyes. Dry your eyes. Exit.
You will never smoke again.
This is good advice. There’s one at Hong Kong too. Nightmare. Just walking past when the door opens is bad.
Quit in 2001. Occasionally dream about it.
Stopped drinking in late 1990s
Never bought dope or other drugs.
Smoked 3/4 joints in early 80s.
Spend most nights smugly polishing halo. Alone.
I have never smoked (anything) in my life, I am 51.
Never interested in even trying it as it was smelly and looked awful.
I do probably drink too much wine though.
Full time Smoker since 17, and its only now I’ve written that do I realise that is 29 years!
I did give up once – worst 4 hours of my life.
I actually properly attempted to give up by substituting Mars Bars whenever the craving took me – I was on about 10 or 12 Mars Bars a day.
This lasted about a week, which probably explains why I’ve got about 5 teeth left in my head.
Mrs D gave up on New Years Day this year – I am now banned from smoking in the house (fair dos)
In a sort of backward, twisted leap of logic, I justify smoking on Health & Safety grounds (it gets me away from my computer screen for the advisory 15 minutes every 2 hours (or something like that?)
And being a smoker promotes a certain hardiness and fitness as we have to go outside in the rain and cold, and (when at work) walk to the nearest smoking station.
There are many ways to unwind from stress, but a Beer and a fag (or maybe sometimes, a cigar) is one of the better ones
How does work treat your smoke breaks compared to non-smoking colleagues?
Are you expected to make up the time?
I guess similar things would apply to a religion that required you to take an hour out of your normal working day to pray to whatever you believed in.
Just wondered.
Never thought of that way – Trust I suppose.
A smoking break is probably the same amount of time as someone going down the coffee shop (or kitchen) for a brew, so all fairs in love and war
It’s like, are you supposed to make up time spent walking between meetings (which is another excuse for a quick fag)
Started smokin in 1971 and stopped in 2004 when my daughter learned to read and got scared by the warning signs on cigarette packs – when she cried and told me she didn’t want me to die it was all the encouragement I needed. As a typical ex smoker I now hate it with a passion.
My parents didn’t smoke when I grew up, but I always wanted to, from an early age. Didn’t start properly until I was 17 though, when I got a full-time job and could afford it.
I smoked between ten and fifteen cigarettes a day for twelve years, when the combination of a useless computer and an even worse internet provider – with the biggest joke of a customer “service” – turned me into an angry chainsmoker. That made me feel ill from the cigarettes for the first time, and also just really fed up with smoking, so I decided that I would quit when the carton I had just bought was finished; giving me plenty of time to adjust to the idea of not smoking.
When I only had one packet left in the carton, my oblivious mum came home from a holiday abroad armed with a new (tax-free) carton as a gift for me…so I had to wait a bit longer to quit – which was good, because I was SO extremely ready when the final packet was gone!
I timed it to be finished the evening before for a three day weekend, when I stayed indoors and slept all the way through any withdrawal symptoms (physical and psychological), and I never felt the urge to smoke again.
I even tested myself two weeks later, buying a small packet and forcing myself to smoke one – it was properly disgusting and I threw the rest of them in the garbage.
That was twenty years ago.
I don’t miss smoking at all, but I can still very occasionally miss my identity as a smoker, and the graceful dance of hands and lips handling the cigarette. I’d never start again, however.
I like smoking. It’s cool and grown-up. Rather like swearing.
F***ing right it is!
Father, sister, mother are all 30-a-day-Rothmans types. Have been all their lives. Me? Never even had a drag of a cigarette, nor have I ever been inclined to. That said, my best friend is the cigar ‘baron’ of the oldest specialist tobacconist in the world (Harrods, Selfridges etc.) and I have pestered him to teach me how to smoke a cigar properly. As I think that’d be cool, once in a while. He, as we say in Australia, isn’t having a bar of it, and reckons I should leave well enough alone.
Wasted a fair chunk of a quarter century’s worth of disposable income on the wretched plant, but wrestled free one day a decade or more ago. Wish you could get red leb vapes, but short of that, nothing would entice me to inhale even a bifter ever again. Shame about the Monte Cristo on the bookshelf, a parting present from colleagues long ago; it’ll stay in its tube forever now, and rightly so.
Started in the 6th form and eventually packed up at about 31/32, 15 years ago now. One of the few certainties in my life is that I shall never smoke again. When I packed up, I kept a cigar I had because I always found a massive gulp of a cigar was a sure fire way to stop hiccups. However, since packing up smoking I hardly ever get hiccups anymore.
I used to be reminded of what I wasn’t missing whenever I cycled past the Players factory in Nottingham on my way to/from work (my first fags were Players No 6). You could tell you were cycling into the wind when you could smell the tobacco about 400 yards before you passed the place. Even that has shut down now.