Going to a carehome

I’m imagining this is a Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph.

This is why, as an adult vaper, I get slightly fed up of all the anti-vape news stories. Obviously I am heavily against kids using them, and I also think the disposable ones are environmentally unfriendly to say the least.

But they’re a major asset in getting people off the cigs as well and it would be good to remember that once in a while. It’s cheaper. It’s healthier - a low bar but you can tell the difference in days after switching.

To my mind you can’t have it both ways. It’s no coincidence that smoking rates have fallen further at the same time that vape shops have popped up everywhere like a rash - they were falling anyway but it’s sped things up a lot. (Incidentally my guess is it’s not high street vape shops selling to kids but the same garages, newsagents etc that would have sold them fags in the past but that’s just anecdotal evidence and conjecture).

I don’t agree with bans. I also don’t think putting little pictures of tumours on a fag packet ever stopped me lighting up once. What I do like it’s seeing politicians finally mentioning ‘oh yeah, by the way, smoking isn’t very good for you either’ after all this moral panic about vaping

(I am ranting a bit because I’m slightly drunk but I have been thinking this a lot this week)

Challenge accepted! What baked goods/headwear combo would you like? A nice madeira fedora? Black forest chapeau?

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I like how they focused on vapes first and then looked at smoking laws…

First they came for the vapes…

I gave up about 5.5 years ago after 30 odd years of pretty heavy tabbing. Fags costed about £10.50 for 20 L&B back then and no doubt the beer accumulator model has raised that to at least £13 by now.

Price was not my primary reason for giving up but I can see how it will help. When I started I could buy 10 packs duty free for £5 and smoke on the plane. The UK old 10p (which was basically a two shilling coin rebadged as 10p) was about the same size as a German 1DM piece. DM - Deutsch Mark. Good enough to fool the removed dispensers in West Germany, back in the day. At the time (mid '80s) there was roughly 4DM to £1 and a pack was about DM2.50 from a street vending machine.

As well as price, we need to realise that nicotine is not the only addictive thing in a ciggie. If it was, then patches, gum etc would just work. They don’t really work very well on their own and you can’t shift the blame onto habit either. I don’t think that nicotine is particularly addictive at all.

Giving up is hard, really hard. It needs will power. When I started giving up I was wheezing rather badly and had a very persistent cough that lasted for about nine months to the point that even I realised I had to do something.

I stopped at around 17:00 one friday evening and had a very long lie in on sat morning. That got me half a day. I hung on until saturday evening and went to bed. I now had managed a day. Another long lie in on sunday. Hang on in there and get to monday. Now I have two days. Then I managed a week, then two weeks, then a month, then two months, three months, half a year, a year.

After a few days I realized I could perhaps do this. I don’t exactly know why I decided to come up with a “mantra” that I would say to myself whenever I craved a ciggie but it really helped. “I don’t want to smell and I don’t want to die” was what I settled on and it really worked for me. Even a smoker knows really how bad they smell and the other wish is a bit obvious!

After about a week my sense of smell and taste went berserk! I could smell people entering a room which was a bit disconcerting. I recall it being similar to when I finally caved in and got some specs sorted out for my eyes. It has calmed down since to “normal”.

If you want to give up then you will need a strategy. I was weak willed enough to need a near death like experience to kick me into some form of action. Giving up fags is a horribly complicated affair and the “treatments” on offer are probably bollocks. I tried a vape and soon realised that it won’t help at all - I’d just replace smoking with … something else that doesn’t really cut it.

I found that as soon as I said my mantra, the cravings really did vanish, for a few minutes, then hours, days. weeks etc. I also had some pretty odd dreams involving fags. Before I gave up, I never smoked in my dreams. I did have several dreams after giving up which involved smoking in some pretty bizarre ways!

Finally: I saved roughly £3,500 per year at 2018 prices by not tabbing. It’s probably more like £4000-4500 now.

Hmmm, this comment escalated somewhat 8)

Then they’d just be accused of taxing the less well off, which is a stick they like to wield against Labour.

The assholes are the ones selling cigarettes.