We can all joke about smoking, especially once we've given up. I'm working just now on the possibility of trying to flog off merchandise at Salut! Sunderland and wondered about an ashtray with the slogan "Watching Sunderland can seriously damage your health".
The French, as you can see above, don't mess around with conditionals. I'm a long time not smoking, so am not sure whether similar warnings on packets of fags in the UK are bold enough to leave as little doubt.
But lots of us have smoked, and many of us have stopped. I still dream about having taken up cigarettes again, and it has been 35 years in my case. In the dream, I keep telling myself I can stop again any time I want, but still I smoke. It does not for a second of waking hours make me want to light up, but may be a sign of the strength of nicotine's grip.
Memory plays tricks but mine tells me I started smoking at choir practice. I was about 12 years old and not much of a chorister, though I did become a star smoker.
At home, I would put the Northern Echo or Daily Herald over my dad's packet of Senior Service, or whatever it was (certainly untipped) that he bought, and slip one out. Then it was a race between it breaking in two in my pocket and finding an opportunity to smoke it.
Up at the church, someone usually had a spare tab or two so I was happy to cadge. Then one of us discovered roll-ups and the combination of Rizla papers and cheap baccy.
Once I started earning, from the age of 17, I set about the practice with a vengeance. It was not until I was well into my journalistic career, a couple of years later, that I made the first of dozens of attempts to stop.
I never minded not being allowed to smoke in court or similar locations, but would seize any opportunity to have a drag during adjournments, when telephoning copy and on the way back to the office.
One of the chores on the Evening Despatch in its Bishop Auckland district office was to take the parcel containing our collective efforts to the Darlington-bound train; sometimes, I would cut it so close that the sprint and effects of tobacco had me gasping for breath all the way back. The resolve to give up would last until I was back in the office and sipping another cup of tea,
The pattern continued. Almost everyone seemed to be puffing away in those days, so it was difficult to find yourself in a non-smoking environments. And when I started working in Fleet Street, the trips away turned a 20-a-day habit into a 30-a-day addiction, the number growing according to how long I was up and about.
Stints in Belfast, where it was common to rise at 6am and still be in the bar at 2am, saw the daily consumption climb to 50. I'd come home after two weeks like a man with chronic bronchitis.
And that, eventually, was how I finally stopped. There must already have been dozens of periods of abstention ranging from hours to a weeks or so, but one Belfast fortnight left me so poorly that it actually hurt - though I certainly tried - to inhale.
I knew I'd never get a better chance. After 10 days or so, I felt better. I hadn't touched a cigarette but rewarded myself by buying a packet of 10. After one, I realised I was missing an open goal and threw the rest away.
In all the years since that last cigarette, I have lit up only on maybe four or five occasions when my wife, very much a pretend smoker (as in one packet a year and no inhaling), wanted a cigarette somewhere outdoors and it was too windy for her to light up for herself. It was occasionally hard at first, especially after meals or when having a drink, but never as hard as I'd feared.
Received wisdom has it that you never stop being a smoker; you're just a smoker who doesn't any longer smoke. My recurring dream suggests the wisdom is sound enough.
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