Almost a fifth of the year 2000 is already over. It is unlikely that this fact will fill you with joy. Yet there is a bunch of embattled masochists for whom every day into this year has been a small victory, a moment to be celebrated, another step towards a great goal.
They are the quitters, the ex-smokers. The healthy. Anti-smoking group ASH estimates there were over a million of them: brave souls who fought through the champagne fog at one minute past midnight on New Year's Eve to extinguish their last, 20th century, smoke. They don't have any figures yet on how many of them are still at it. But if other stats are anything to go by, their numbers lessen by the day. A third of all smokers try to stop every year, but only something like 4% make it.
I am not one of them, at least according to my critics. At some point between the start of January and the end I stopped buying cigarettes and, well, became someone who didn't buy cigarettes any more. I'm not allowed to go further and call myself an ex-smoker you see, because I have been known on occasion to pike one off a pitying friend or colleague.
To smokers and ex-smokers alike, this is the unforgiveable sin. Friends who recently congratulated me on having "given up" have shot looks of disillusioned scorn on catching me inhaling like blazes in the kitchen.
Giving up smoking is a bizarre ritual, subject to extraordinary peer pressure. Hell, even heroin addicts are allowed methadone. But the medicinal application of a Marlboro once a fortnight to remind you what a horrible habit it is? Suddenly you're Really Letting Yourself Down.
The thing is, it works for me. Like every last smoker on the planet, I have been consumed by racking coughs and self-loathing and have tried to quit on countless occasions. But such is the weight of expectation once one announces an intention to stop, any small lapse is absolute failure. There is no permissible third way when it comes to cigarettes.
This is partly because rational, grown-up debate on smoking is remarkably thin on the ground. Public pronouncements on the habit divide neatly into morbid statistics from the anti-smoking lobby, and a bloody-minded assertion from the libertarians that they will fight to the (cancer-riddled) death for the right to light up. Considering a third of British adults smoke, and 450 kids take up the habit every day, we would surely do well to consider in rather more rounded terms quite why so many of us enjoy sucking on burning leaves.
Addiction, of course, is part of it, but only part. Because there is a poetry to indulging in a cigarette that will never be found in having a cup of coffee. A fag cadged, or offered, is an intimate little exchange - somehow brotherly. And that sharing a cigarette has become such a cliche during the companionable, squidgy, slightly awkward post-coital moment is not surprising.
Of course, cigarettes also kill you, and in no uncertain terms. Which is why I quit, or cut down, or whatever it is I'm allowed to say about the fact that I'm now significantly healthier. Wednesday is National No Smoking day and a great opportunity - if landmark days work for you - to give "giving up" another try. If you decide to do so, best of luck - I can't recommend it highly enough. But you are allowed more than a pang of regret for the dear friends you are setting aside and the deep, deep joy they have brought you. Acknowledging that fact might just be the first step towards living without them.
