My Stupidest Mistake Ever

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In yesterday’s posting, I described how I am addicted to Diet Coke/Coke Light/Coke Zero and I am maybe a borderline alcoholic according to some bullshit online quizzes.  But all of this pales into insignificance compared to my main addiction.

Which is nicotine.

I have done a lot of really stupid things in my life, but the most stupid of them all by far was taking up smoking.  Whereas most of my other stupid mistakes have siply ended up costing me a lot of money, taking up smoking will probably mean my paying the ultimate price sooner or later, which is costing me my life.

I don’t even have the excuse that I was young and naive to blame for my stupidity because, as with many things in my life, I was a late starter. 

I was 17 or 18 and already starting to hate my first shit job, which was working in a bank.  Like many people working in shit jobs, this meant that I ended up living for the weekend (which gives me a very tenuous reason for playing you this track):

Hard-Fi – Living For The Weekend

That’s another growing addiction, actually – embedding as many YouTube clips into each posting I make as possible.

But I digress …

Because the working week was so shit, I wanted to make my Big Saturday Night Out something really special.  Just spending four hours down the pub drinking wasn’t quite enough.  And so I thought that smoking would somehow make those four hours even more special.

“I’m not going to get addicted,”  I thought to myself, “because I’m never going to smoke apart from on Saturday nights.”

What a complete fucking twat I was for thinking that.  This of course led to, “well having another one on Monday isn’t going to hurt”, which led to another and another and another until I was smoking whenever I could.

I never smoked at home – I had this deal with my Mum whereby I pretended that I didn’t smoke while she pretended that she didn’t know that I smoked, and this kept the status quo in a nice non-confrontational conspiracy of silence.

But when I left home, there were no such restraints in place and so I was smoking all the time.

Not much could stop me from smoking most of the time.  My last employers were pretty late in going fully non-smoking in the office, but by that time I was so integral to the company that I just moved my desk next to the door of the smoking room and carried on puffing away while the boss turned a blind eye, knowing full well that my productivity (and thus profitability) would decline rapidly if I had to spend half my working day in the smoking room in order to feed my nicotine cravings.

After this job, I then went on to become self-employed, meaning that there were no barriers at all to stop me smoking ‘at work’ all the time, because I am the boss and so I do what I like.  And I like to smoke – a lot.  My home office is constantly in a fog-bound state and, because I find it impossible to type without a cig smouldering between the second and third fingers of my right hand, there is usually a think covering of ash on my keyboard and en route to the overflowing ashtray next to it.

Mainly because of this fact, I reckon that I’m on 50-60 per day these days (and have been for many, many years).

I don’t know how anyone in the UK can afford to develop a major smoking habit these days though.  What are they now? Getting on for £6 ($10) a packet?

It’s been a running (sick) joke for me that I am going to give up when they get to a pound a packet.  Because, three times now, just as the price of a packet of fags gets to a quid, I move to some place where they are cheaper.  When I got to Latvia in 2004, they were about 45p a packet.  As a result of hyper-inflation and EU tariffs, they just reached the pound mark when I moved to Egypt where they are again only 45p a packet.

At this rate, I’ll be living somewhere like Eritrea in a decade’s time, simply so I can give myself an excuse just to keep on smoking.

Egypt is like a smoker’s paradise.  Everyone smokes everywhere here.  It’s like entering a timewarp going into a branch of HSBC Bank and seeing everyone sucking on a fag (note to American readers: this means smoking a cigarette, not giving oral sex to a homosexual, which is not something that I have ever seen in The World’s Local Bank, and nor am I likely to seeing as how homosexuality is illegal in this country and will probably result in the offenders being hung).  I feel like I’m back in a Seventies sitcom like On The Buses or Mind Your Language.

There are signs though that, even as messed up a country as Egypt is going the way as the rest of the world when it comes to smoking issues.  When I arrived here eight months ago, the packets looked really cool with just a small warning in Arabic (so I had no idea what they were saying [I guessed that it probably said 'Smoking is Great!']).  But then, a couple of months ago, they started looking like this:

Egyptian L&M Blue

At first glance I thought that it was a picture of a top Egyptian fighter ace who had scored a record-breaking number of Israeli kills in his MiG, but they I realized that it was a bloke in hospital on a ventilator.  He still looks like a pretty healthy, attractive chap though despite this.  Some pictures on some Canadian packets that I saw once of diseased livers are much more disgusting than this.

L&M Blue is my brand of choice these days.  For the first 22 years of my life it was Dunhill International – a brand that I thought you could get anywhere in the World.  Until I arrived in Latvia, where I found it was impossible to get them.  I ended up buying a packet of every single brand on sale in the country and trying one of each of them.  Most of them were completely ghastly – unsmokeable – and so I gave them away to the girls in the office.  I eventually discovered that Prince Whites were my favourites.  However, these were quite hard to find and so L&M Blues were my back-up brand.  A year later when I was poverty stricken, these became my main brand as a result of them only being about 60p a packet instead of 85p for the Prince Whites.  When you smoke three packets a day, all those 25p’s start mounting up over a month.

Anyway, moving back to the current location of Egypt …

Although the fact that I can light up wherever and whenever I like is incredibly convenient for a hardcore nicotine addict like me, it doesn’t help at all in trying to give up or even cut down which, in some ways, is a shame.

During my life, I have seen many places become non-smoking – first it was cinemas, then public transport, planes, etc., and in my latter days in Latvia, in restaurants and bars.  In each of these cases, it was really hard at first to go without smoking but, eventually, I got used to the fact that I wasn’t able to smoke in these places and so lost the desire to smoke.

The exception to this though is in bars.  Bars are places that seem to be made for smoking and to have a drink without a smoke is an unthinkable combination to me.  I was fortunate in that, during the 18 months I spent in Latvia when the anti-smoking laws were in place, there were a few bars where they completely ignored the rules, or else took advantage of the fact that, if there was a separate room, you were still allowed to smoke.  So I ended up only frequenting those places.

I think that the government has got it all wrong with regards to their ‘non-smoking in public places’ laws.  As we all know, they could stop smoking tomorrow if they wanted to by simply making tobacco a controlled substance and forcing us all to go to ’smoke-easies’ for an illegal toke.  But the governments can’t afford to do this because of the vast revenues that they make from taxes on tobacco.  So my solution would be to make each bar and restaurant pay a large license fee each year to allow smoking on their premises which would be passed on to their clients in the form of higher prices for drinks. Then at least we would all have a choice rather than being told what we can and can’t do by some nanny-state.  And the government would make some extra cash in the form of taxes to boot.

Like most smokers, I have attempted to stop smoking on some occasions in the past.  Not for my own sake, but because I was nagged into it by Significant Others.  This made the attempts doomed to failure as I never really had the desire to stop smoking.   I think that the best attempt I made was for about a week, going the whole nicotine patch and nicotine chewing gum route.  I was doing OK until I went to a rave the following weekend after I started, where there was no way that I could spoil the event by not having a ciggie, and so I relapsed.

Another factor that makes me a serious hardcore smoker is the fact that I am incredibly well organized.  I never go out on a Saturday night unless I am tooled up with at least three packets of cigarettes and at least two lighters (there is nothing more infuriating for a smoker than having cigarettes but no way of lighting them).  My friends used to call me ‘Two-Pack’ due to the fact that they always knew that I carried a spare packet with me at all times and so would never run out.

This was actually one of my main tools for making friends in new places.  By 4.00am in a club, I was one of the few people in a club to have any ciggies left and so people would often ask me for one.  As a complete social inadequate with terminal shyness, this led to conversation and making new friends.  So smoking does have some advantages.

But, generally speaking, smoking is a really stupid habit for anyone to take up – it really is not big and it’s not clever.  There are few people in the world as big on Civil Liberties as I am, but really, kids, you are better off not doing it at all.  Drop some Class A drugs on a Saturday night if you want a high – that’s fine with me – but try and stay away from the ciggies as they are much addictive than the majority of drugs.

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Tags: addiction, cigarettes, egypt, Egyptian, life, musings, nicotine, personal, random, random thoughts, smoking, thoughts, tobacco