One of my colleagues gave up smoking eight years ago. He is full of support for me in my new life as a non-smoker - all 10 extraordinary days of it. The first two years, he tells me, are ghastly, the next three years a misery of discomfort. After that it's OK, apart from the occasional, sometimes quite powerful, craving for a cigarette. One must simply get through it, he says.
Another colleague tells me that she gave up for four months last year with the help of nicotine patches and it was effortless; in fact my giving up has already been endangered by my failure to use nicotine patches at the outset. All the evidence suggests, she says, that nicotine patch users are more sucessful at giving up. (Her return to the dark side she puts down to one drunken cigar at Christmas, and laziness.)
When you smoke and do not want to think about stopping, nonsmokers are tolerable just so long as they stay quiet about it. Now I have achieved entry into the world of ex-smokers and perpetual giver-uppers, and I am a magnet for unsolicited advice and personal testimony. I am kinda loving it though. Giving-up world is like parents' world - from the outside, nerve-shreddingly boring; once on the inside, a fabulous source of small talk.
The Gina Ford of giving-up world is Allen Carr. People are divided into the Carr-for-president camp, and those who'd like to see him burned at the stake. Carr is the man who invented the EASYWAY (sic) to give up smoking, a method characterised by repetition of a few key points (there is no upside to smoking/don't do patches/you cannot have "the odd fag") and random CAPITALISATION.
At a wedding on Saturday I met an ex-smoker who had not had a single craving since reading the book, and another man who had done the course three times but related the story with a fag in one hand. Each time you do the course it is different, he said, but as a three-time flunkee he has gone as far as he can with Carr; there is no fourth level. Then I met a man who had been packed off to the course by his company, only to find the great man himself at the front of the class. He mistrusted Carr, hated the course, and still smokes.
I dimly remember reading Carr a few years ago, and liked the fact that he lets you smoke all the way through to the end of the book, but am not desperate enough to plough through it again; even Carr, who has a healthy ego, admits he is no great one for the wordy things.
My boyfriend, who has been staggeringly miserable since giving up, buckled down and read the book at the weekend. It did not magically transform his life, but perhaps that's because he did not read it BEFORE giving up smoking, as Carr advises.
As for what to do with all those ashtrays - so far I am using them for cherry pips, that kind of thing.
