Last man smoking

Unlike many of these remaining smokers, I am not proud of my habit. All that “My grandad was on 30 a day and got hit by a bus at 95” bravado is idiotic. I totally accept that smoking is bad, potentially terminally bad, for my health. I accept it makes me less attractive to other people, not least my own wife and children. My daughter, in particular, hates me smoking, finds it embarrassing. Worse, my son is beginning to find it intriguing.

I don’t think the smoking ban should be reversed (but neither do I think it should be extended to include open-air public spaces). Similarly, I approve of heavy taxation on tobacco. On balance, I don’t think anti-smoking measures have “gone too far”, or that fundamental British liberties are threatened by anti-smoking legislation. I don’t mistake mild inconvenience for persecution.

Nor do I think smoking is cool and that all the fun, groovy people are outside. On the contrary, my continued smoking has more to do with conservatism than radical chic. Once I have found a routine, I stick to it. Why do people keep doing anything? Partly because they fear change. They’ve found an activity or a mode of behaviour that works, or seems to work, or has worked, for them. They’re more fearful of making the change than they are of the (possible) consequences of not making it.

So, I’m not proud; but I’m not ashamed either. Some readers will think I should be ashamed, but I’m not. I don’t (present circumstances excepted) bang on about smoking, but neither am I in denial. A surprising number of smokers are, perhaps to themselves, certainly to others. I know lots of people, upstanding members of society, no longer in the first flush of youth, whose parents or children or partner have no idea they smoke. I don’t mean people who nick the odd crafty one at a party, I mean regular, yet entirely clandestine, smokers. Perhaps, on reflection, that figure of one in five adults is optimistic.

But there’s no getting away from it. Most people my age and background, if they ever started, have now stopped. People I thought would never stop have stopped. Twenty years ago, when I started at The Times, probably between a third and a half of my friends and colleagues smoked, regularly or socially.

I smoked at my desk at work. Lots of us did. We always sat in the smoking section of a restaurant, and the non-smokers among us could lump it. Occasionally, I find myself wistful for those times. There’s no doubt the ban has affected conversation – my conversation at any rate. At a certain point in the evening, I want to both smoke and talk, and I can’t do that now. Socialising has become a strangely fragmented business for me. I miss 20 per cent of any interaction. On the other hand, I have a succession of fleeting interactions with strangers outside.

We’re down to a handful, now, outside the office in the rain, huddled on back patios at parties, hunched in the doorway of the pub. Fifteen years ago I still balanced an ashtray on my chest in bed. Now, I cannot begin to calibrate my wife’s reaction if I were to light up anywhere in the house. Once in a while, if we have people round and I don’t want to miss the chat, I’ll try to get away with standing in the open doorway to the back garden. “Just go outside and finish it,” my wife will say. Her opposition is implacable, relentless.

I’m a rational creature in most respects. We had a “healthy eating week” in the staff canteen recently. The food on offer was what I eat all the time. I exercise a lot. I am back – admittedly after a fairly lengthy blip – to drinking moderately. My life entails only occasional periods of stress. So why, well into the 21st century, do I still indulge in this self-destructive 20th-century behaviour, now all but restricted, in the Western world at least, to the poor, the young, the ill-educated, the desperate – none of which I am?

It’s a hard question, not least because part of what may constitute an answer lies beyond my competence. By which I mean there may be some factor, currently not acknowledged, common to the physiological and/or psychological make-up of the remaining hard core. Maybe we need the nicotine more. Maybe our oral fixations are stronger. So maybe we are self-medicating – incorrectly, but rationally – to compensate for some chemical or emotional lack. Maybe, for some as yet unknown reason, smoking “works” for us in a way it does not work for other people. The disincentive to quit is therefore larger.

Or maybe we are constitutionally more irresponsible than the norm, less capable of making a balanced judgment on the basis of probable consequences. (The less charitable might summarise that as “more stupid and more selfish”.) The smoking ban does not, significantly, extend to the most irresponsible, least risk-averse, most selfish group of people in society: those in prison. There, you have a lot of men with a poor grasp of consequences, some of them potentially dangerous and unstable, with time on their hands. They need occupation and pacification, and are thus deemed to need to be allowed to smoke. As are the inmates of secure mental-health units. Perhaps the personality type of those committed smokers who aren’t incarcerated isn’t so different from those that are.

I don’t know, I repeat, whether the preceding two paragraphs contain much truth. But they may do.

In advancing reasons for my continued smoking, incidentally, the distinction between an explanation and a justification is vital. I’m not saying, “This is a good reason to smoke.” I’m saying, “This is perhaps a good reason why I still smoke.” Advocacy, no. Attempted understanding, yes.

I started smoking aged 18 in the summer of 1982. Until then, I had been very anti. My mum and dad both smoked when I was growing up. Now both 78, my mum still has the odd one and my dad, who gave up about five years ago, wishes he did. My parents promised my brother and me £200 if we had not had a cigarette by the age of 21. My brother collected; I did not. Indeed, my brother has never touched a cigarette, which rather weakens any argument that I smoke because I inherited (or learnt) the tendency to do so from our parents.

Even if I did start because my parents (and friends, and girlfriend at the time) smoked, it doesn’t explain why I’m still at it almost 30 years later. Perhaps there’s an element of loyalty to those years, the glory years of Crampton family smoking, 25 years or so ago, gossiping around the kitchen table, a thick blue haze hovering above us.

Smoking is often discussed in terms of its symbolic appeal. I think this is overplayed. The fact is smoking is primarily an enjoyable, rapid, convenient way to introduce a powerful, stimulating, highly pleasurable drug into your body. You take a drag, your brain floods with dopamine seven seconds later. To state the obvious, those of us who still smoke do so because we want (and perhaps need) that actual short-term physical pleasure more than we fear the possible long-term physical harm.

The truth is, I discovered that I liked smoking, and basically I still do. Or rather, I discovered that I liked it after a degree of experimentation. The key experiment was I ditched normal cigarettes in favour of hand-rolled ones. If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I’d be smoking now. Thus, in seeking to refine, control, customise and, in my view, improve, my smoking experience, I removed two massive incentives to quitting. One is that normal cigarettes are indeed every bit as ghastly for yourself and others as non-smokers say they are. The other is that normal cigarettes have become prohibitively expensive. Roll-ups are neither ghastly nor expensive.

My experience with factory-made cigarettes was probably similar to that of many people. Tried one, didn’t like it, tried again, persisted, stopped, had the odd one, had a few more, stopped. This over the course of a year or two in my late teens.

To this day I don’t actually like “normal” cigarettes. I had to smoke Marlboros for this photoshoot because roll-ups don’t show up well on camera; they don’t give off enough smoke. The normal fags made me feel sick. Once lit, normal cigarettes belch out smoke even if they’re just lying in an ashtray. Roll-ups contain fewer burning agents, so go out if you leave them. They are therefore much less antisocial. Normal cigarettes, I find, either don’t taste of much or taste of chemicals. I can quite understand why smokers want to stop smoking them and non-smokers regard them as disgusting. Quite apart from the health risk they pose, they are a very inferior product.

So I might well have stopped all those years ago if I hadn’t tried rolling my own and found I liked it, unwittingly creating a large obstacle to ever quitting. Most smokers don’t like the fact that they smoke. Given what they smoke, I don’t blame them. But I do like what I smoke. And I like the ritual of rolling. It’s one of the few manual tasks I am any good at.

I haven’t smoked in my own house, indeed have barely smoked anywhere indoors, since our first child was born 14 years ago. So I don’t inflict smoke on others. Neither are my children going short because I smoke. I buy most of my tobacco abroad where it is cheaper, spending no more than £15 a week on smoking. If I smoked a couple of packs of normal fags a day, at £7 a pack, cost would become an incentive to quit. At the moment, it isn’t.

I don’t kid myself that roll-ups are a healthy option. My health would be better if I didn’t smoke at all. But I do think roll-ups are not as bad for me as normal cigarettes, if only because they contain less tobacco. I roll them thin and am done in a couple of minutes.

Under pressure from my wife, I’ve given up a few times: at 27; at 33; at 40ish. I found it surprisingly easy in a social context and miserably difficult at work. Mostly, I missed it. I just didn’t want to quit enough. Now, I content myself with monitoring my intake. I am a moderate, and yet regular, smoker, never fewer than four, never more than ten a day, even on a big night out. My current daily average for 2011 hovers around seven.

I have an addiction, clearly, but it appears to be an addiction I can satisfy with moderate indulgence. I’d like to get the seven a day down to five, and then three. If I got it to three, I’d stop there. I mean, stop reducing the number, not stop the smoking. I might make a switch to cigars if I felt I could afford it. I remember one cigar, in Cuba, significantly, in the early Nineties, when they cost $100 for a box of 25, sitting on the balcony of the Hotel Inglaterra in Havana, possibly one of the happiest hours of my life.

Or I might give this snus stuff a go, this chewing tobacco doing well in Sweden that is illegal here. There are, after all, many ways to get nicotine into your system other than burning it. And anyway, there are worse things you can do, aren’t there, than smoke three fags a day? Some say, no, there aren’t. A doctor told me the damage done by cigarettes is done by the first one. Therefore, he argued, moderation is fairly pointless. I know he’s the doctor and I’m not, but I have to say what he said feels wrong. If it were true that moderation is pointless, someone who smoked one a day would be at equal risk of various diseases as someone who smoked 100. Plainly, that is not the case. Surely it does matter how many you smoke, in terms of current health and future risk, just as an occasional cheeseburger is OK and five Big Macs a day are not (which is why, incidentally, that silly documentary Supersize Me was absurdly unfair to McDonald’s).

I know that, from a health point of view, the best option is not to smoke at all. But in most other human activities, we calibrate degrees of risk against degrees of pleasure, or convenience, or personal freedom. From a purely health point of view, it’d be better if no one got on a motorbike ever again. But we think the guy who rides up a busy street at 30mph is running an acceptable risk and the guy who rides up it at 70mph is not, and we’re right.

I repeat: I am addicted. Don’t deny it. But you can still choose how much to indulge your addiction. You can be addicted to two pints of beer a day, or you can be addicted to eight. None is better than two, but two is a lot better than eight. You can be addicted to 7 cigarettes a day or you can be addicted to 40. None is best, but 7 is better than 40.

I can see why the government and lobby groups have gone for a zero-tolerance policy on cigarettes. But life is difficult. Temptation is everywhere. Many of us, most of us, are going to need a vice, a crutch, a helper, at some point in our lives. If it’s a choice between 40 Bensons a day and being a stone overweight, the sensible choice is being a stone overweight. But what if it’s seven skinny, no-harm-to-anyone-but-yourself roll-ups versus being a stone overweight? What’s the sensible choice then? What if it’s seven fags versus feeling continually stressed, losing your temper, losing concentration, thinking about smoking so much you might as well be doing the damned thing? What if it’s seven fags versus drinking way, way too much, as many non-smokers (and many smokers, of course) do?

Besides, I’m an optimist. I’ve seen amazing things, things that no one thought possible, happen in my lifetime. I’ve seen the Berlin Wall come down, Mandela go from prison to president, a black man elected to run America, Hull City promoted to the Premier League. The stupidity of some human beings is matched only by the ingenuity of others. They’ll find a cure for cancer before too long.

SMOKING: THE FACTS

• Male smokers will lose 13.4 years of their lives. Female smokers will lose 14.3 years of their lives.

• Smokers are more stressed than non-smokers.

• You are 53 per cent more likely to get divorced if you are a smoker.

• In England, 1 in 7 15-year-olds is a regular smoker.

• Smoking has been estimated to cost the NHS £5.2 billion a year.

• In 2009-10 the Government earned £8.8 billion in revenue from tobacco tax (excluding VAT).