Smoking matters

 

Over the many years since I started smoking I have been a pretty good customer. Starting back in England with packets of ten Gold Leaf in my late teens, I progressed to Kent cigarettes while in the United States. The in the swinging London of the sixties we found Rothmans and Stuyvesant well suited for combining with other ingredients.

But as of the seventies I switched to Marlboro (with episodes of smoking the Prince brand favoured by girlfriends from Scandinavia). 

While I am fully aware of the arguments against smoking I have blithely persisted with my indulgence in this in many ways inexcusable habit. And it is not for health reasons that I now seek to modify my behaviour.

Cigarettes simply account for too much regular expenditure when one is trying to live on a very constrained budget! Six euro for a daily pack is profligacy which must be countered! It is unconscionable in comparison with my wine ration... a litre of Chateau Tetrapak vin blanc ordinaire for less that two euro!

So have I consulted all the websites which tell us how we can quit smoking?

No. I have for the moment found my own approach, with the initial target being a reduction of consumption by a half. Not all that hard.

1. Ration the cigarettes to one per ninety minutes during the entire day.
2. Avoid smoking as an ancillary activity, devote that five or six minutes only to the smoking of that damned cigarette.
3. Enter the time of each cigarette pause in an Excel log. 

Several consequences quickly emerge. Some are so clear that I feel this approach borders on self-applied aversion therapy. Each cigarette pause becomes an almost unwelcome interruption, invasive in the schedule of the day's activities, whether working at the computer or reading in the evenings. And ten times a day I am obliged to ask myself whether there is truly any pleasure to be derived from this noxious habit.

But most of all there is the economics of the whole business... .  30,000 euro to the benefit of Philip Morris just since the beginning of this new century? Madness!