I Quit

It's hard enough coming to terms with the fact that my father smoked himself to death but watching my mother wither away from 30 years of passive smoking was exactly the incentive I needed to finally quit killing myself.

Dad's final words "It's too late for me, but not for you and your brother, ... yet!" resonated within me, but not enough for my brother and I to stop immediately. In fact we had no sooner sobbed our dismay, having just learned of his death on the operating table from a ruptured aorta, than we were lighting-up in our grief! The irony was not entirely lost on me at least, but it would take several more months of serious chugging on my roll-ups, and the near extinction of my dear old mum before I finally got around to heeding my dad's deathbed speech.

It wasn't the finality, aged 78, of my chain smoking dad, who had experienced his first heart-attack aged 52 that broke tobacco's demonic spell over me, although it helped. Nor, in truth, the sound of my mum wheezing into the telephone receiver, herself now confirmed as a victim of secondary smoking with the same diagnosis of acute angina that had slowly but inexorably confined my father to his musty armchair - in front of the tv in the dining room - for the last 28 years. I had only re-started myself in 2006 when on a visit to Granada in Spain my ex-girlfriend had pronounced the end of our relationship across the table of a crowded restaurant. In an effort to avoid the inevitable scene I left the building and whilst walking around the neighbourhood found myself overwhelmed by the Fortuna advertisements which dominated the streets and hoardings which were the backdrop to my misery.

The packaged goods - a euphemistic reference to their poisonous contents within the tobacco industry - had made an early impression on me. As a child I had like many of my generation been regularly supplied with chocolate and candy imitations of their lethal big-brothers, and this had conditioned an early desire, if not actual taste, for being seen as a 'smoker'. Cigarettes, cigars and pipes regularly arrived in my christmas stockings and it was fascinating how their actual appearance could delay the gratification of eating the carefully disguised confectionery in an absurd parody of famous film-star smokers or even our own parents whose habit was not then regarded as social, if not actual suicide.