I went from cradle to about 18 without smoking regularly (occasional sneaked cigs while hidden the local wood were the best way to get out of actually following the proscribed course of cross country runs). More frequent indulgence began at college and Old Holborn quickly got replaced by Duma, which was rebranded as Drum and remains my fag of choice, in stick-thin rollies so fine that filters have to be cut in half lengthways to fit. Sometimes I have favoured the Camel light, especially if picking up a load of them in an airport but hand-rolling has been my consistent vice.

Sometimes, of course, I have stopped altogether for a while, be it days, weeks or months. At the most, in the days when smoking was a lot easier and more acceptable than it is know, I would go through an ounce of Drum and a pack of Marlboro reds in a week, and had the nicotine stained fingers to show for it. These days a small pack of Drum and a pack of blue Rizzla will last the best part of a fortnight (‘Well, that’s not going to kill you’ was my doctor’s surprisingly insouciant response when I gave her an honest description of my smoking habit on my last visit.) And the smoking ban has made me more likely to take tobacco to the pub, though not restaurants and gigs, because it provides the perfect excuse to nip outside for a few minutes of personal space once in a while.

in the right hands a cigarette looks very cool, (although probably not mine, alas).

But at RMB 15 (approx. GBP 1.50) a packet financially I can afford to. Were I living in the UK, I'd probably follow you on the weekly small pack of Drum.

Do you remember when people used to offer the fags around before lighting-up? Yep, it's still like that in Asia.

I'll have the very occasional fag to accompany the occasional pint on a night out. If I go out on the pop, about one time in three I'll smoke. That's it. I probably average about 2 a month, but there might be whole stretches of time where I don't touch one. Sometimes it's just what I fancy; other times it makes me feel physically ill. I treat it like strong drink: taken sparingly as a very occasional treat on the rare occasions I want it.

I smoked quite a bit in my late teens and early twenties, though. Gave up properly just before meeting the now-GLW, and had a brief relapse during my PGCE. I'm not in any sense a "smoker" now though.

fool that I am, no interest in quitting though. I demand that everyone I know must buy me fags every time they even think about getting on a plane. They're €8.55 a pack here.

I started smoking in my early twenties. Being the pretentious type, I decided that there was no way I was smoking the same crap as all the proles so I used to go to the - now long gone - tobacconist on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh and buy Gauloises Extra Mild rolling tobacco. I'd roll them by hand with a slimline filter in batches of ten and carry them around in a tarnished cigarette case. Boy, was I insufferable but they were delicious cigarettes.

I always told myself I was a habitual rather than addicted smoker, never more than ten or so a day unless I was going out. This turned out to be true when I got out of the habit after meeting my other half. She got a bit tired of nicotine-flavoured smooching so I stopped.

Nowadays I tend to get the urge when I'm hill-walking. There is nothing so tasty as a good roll-up when you reach the top of a munro - it must be the perverse combination of fresh and foul air.

And still going strong, sort of. I know I shouldn't, but I do. I don't enjoy every single one, but nothing could come close to replacing the feeling I get with the ones I do enjoy. Besides, my wife smokes far more than me so it's impossible to even try to give up.

But I welcome the smoking ban. As inconvenient as it is - and it does rather break up the party sometimes unless the party moves outside which happens often - it stops me smoking as much as I would if it wasn't in existence. I smoke considerably less on a night out than I do at home. I'm so used to not being able to smoke anywhere it's really no longer an issue.

One day it'll be banned in your own house, your car, even outside. That day's surely coming. I don't know why people are so over-zealous about smoking, especially in the US. Pull out your gun and no one bats an eye. Get a fag out on the other hand...

There's a great picture of my dad putting me (as a baby) into a car seat and the fag in his mouth is literally inches from my face. These days social services would be involved. Ah those salad days, eh?

Gave up two years ago.
Went cold turkey and avoided any friends who smoked for a while and it worked.
I still occasionally "puff" on a pen just to see how I feel about the whole need and action of smoking.
It will never truly leave me.

But I am gradually turnng into one of those people who will move away from someone who is smoking becaue it literally makes me sick.
Eating lunch outside with a smoker nearby will upset me these days and I will move.

I am not rude or judgemental to smokers but I have left it behind.

I fully understand the idea that smoking is pleasurable but, in reality, it's a terrible delusion. Don't miss it at all.

I read a quote once along the lines of: "The only pleasure of smoking is relieving the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal; symptoms that only smoking gives you."

how many 20 year olds smoke now as opposed to, say, 20 years ago. I don't smoke, I never have and very few of my friends do. Growing up, smoking wasn't that common and also, it's incredibly expensive.

I wasn't bothered either way when the smoking ban was introduced, but I think it's definitely been a good thing. It's so nice not to come home from a pub not smelling like an ashtray.

However, I can't deny, in the right hands, smoking looks damn cool

Gave up about 6 years ago and haven't had one since. I was an on and off sort of smoker - my post divorce years were my peak. I had money and time. Cigarettes help me use a bit of both. My abiding memory of cigarettes is that horrible one you can sometimes have after a lot of drink, normally about 12:30 am, in a club. The one that turns you dizzy and makes you feel sick. If I smell cigarette smoke now, that's the feeling I get. It's quite handy.

My Mum and Dad both smoked like troopers but have given up due to the massive scare of Mum being diagnosed with Emphysema whilst in New Zealand. The journey back nearly killed her.

And I have kids now. The thought of them taking up smoking is unbearable.

I started smoking at 16 and stopped at 36 although by then I'd had 3 goes at stopping smoking that had lasted 6 months and maybe 20 or 30 goes that had gone 5 to 7 days. At 36 I worked out that I'd smoked for half my life.

That wasn't the reason I stopped though. I stopped because it was making me ill, it made me cough, really cough. I am either lucky or unlucky that I don't have the lungs for smoking. If I didn't have the coughing, and the dreaded fear of getting out of bed for setting off the smokers cough, I'd probably still be smoking now. My grandad died young way before I was born due to smoking. Now being 41 I have seen several people I have known die because of smoking, it can happen very quickly, my wifes friend's mother worked hard with her husband to build up a sucessful business which they sold for several million in their early 60's. Shortly afterwards she went the doctor with chest pains and 8 weeks later she was dead, thats 8 weeks - 50 days or so, 50 days to lose half your body weight and die in unspeakable agony, and never got to enjoy the profits of her hard work, never got to see her grand children, and all because of what? Smoking.

Not that stopped me of course, neither did watching a work friend of mine die in in his mid fourties of lung cancer, neither did a friends mother being too ill to hold her grandchild and dieing days later

And now I have to live the rest of my life wondering if it will be cut short by lung cancer because of a foolish choice I made as a naive and impressionable 16 year old, or will my weakened lungs let me down with a heavy dose of flu?

Still, smoking, relaxes you for a few seconds. Carry on.

*pet peeve / rant alert*

Grew up watching my father (a life long smoker) die a slow, lingering death of lung cancer. He was gone before I was 12, along with him my childhood. The very thought of smoking just makes my mind boggle - the idea of potentially inflicting what I went through as a child on my own offspring (should any arrive) is too horrible to contemplate.

And then a couple of years later, my maternal grandmother (a smoker also) went through the same thing. So that was my teens destroyed, too. I spent more of my childhood in hospital and comforting my mother, than I did in a playground.

Some will say that my father had a choice - and he did - but he was in his sixties when he died (having had me very late in life) which was the late 80s. So he probably started smoking at some point in the 1930s, where I suspect the health advice was less commonly heeded.

So, through my particular lens, I view smokers as selfish idiots, poisoning themselves and hurting their families, and tobacco companies as the devil. Sorry.

Also, don't get me started on people who throw cigarette ends out of the car window or just drop them on the floor in the streets. Fuckwits to a man. Who do they think is going to pick them up, and what the hell gives them the sense of entitlement? (And let's not start on the "But I pay more taxes". Don't care. You're being a dick. Stop it.)

when I could get them, Boyards, the finest cigarettes known to homme-kind. For 24 years. Still addicted. Haven't touched one for 10 years. Still miss it. Don't start, kids!

but the decision never to smoke a cigarette was one.

So - 21 years ago. In PRACTICE gave up completely this year. I was only buying maybe a packet of 10 a week but the office I was in, and in recent times the project I was on meant it was part of a sort of ritual to get away from the screen, and also a nice interlude a couple of times during the day with some really funny people. Not such fun in the depths of winter. Also it was very stressful at work for years and years and a puff sort of blotted something out in my head - which isn't such a pleasant thought.

Different office - often work at home actually - realised I didn't want ciggies at all any more and the pleasure of having the occasional perfect one was outweighed by the guilt of doing it at all. It sort of - went away

...as it happens- have been for about 20 years.

It took numerous attempts to finally sever my alliance with Nick O' Teen. On and off, I smoked tobacco (mostly rollies, which I will concur are less revolting than tailor-mades) from age 16 till about 40 (I'm now 45). Later on, when out socially, the combination of a cheroot and a decent pint usually gave me a real buzz, and that's why I kept it up so long. But of course smoking is a stupid, pointless, antisocial, stinky habit, and it was making me quite evidently ill, and that's what finally got me to stop. Happily, at 45 I feel a LOT healthier than at 40.

Also, tobacco products are now so insanely inflated with tax, why prop up The Man purely to scratch an itch.

I'm nearly 42 now. That's a scary thought. I wasn't one of the smoking crew at school, round the back of the bins. No, I started in secret and only my best mate knew. The look on the smoking crew's faces on the last day of school when I lit up a cig was priceless. Not long after that I started smoking at home, my mum was a smoker so there was a combination of not feeling able to tell not to, and welcoming a fellow smoker into the fold.

I gave up the week before my 30th birthday - a friend bet me that I couldn't give up and also that I couldn't last a year. I won that bet (£1000!!! Were we really made of money at that point?!?!?) and went on to be a non-smoker for 3 years. I also put on nearly 5 stone. I may have smelt better, but I certainly didn't look it. Although a programme of exercise did turn some of that bulk into muscle, which was a first.

Unfortunately a period of turmoil arose, some through my own doings and the cigs came calling again. I gave up the year before last when my wife got pregnant, but started again when my son was about 3 months, again because of a period of turmoil. Want to give up again.

It's not the same these days when every cigarette is outside. I used to enjoy a cig whilst sitting around watching a film or listening to music. I've not smoked indoors, even at home for over two years.

I do have the same waist measurements as when I was 25 again though.

at the age of 47. Had tried several times before to no avail. My daughter was 5 years old and learning to read - she read the warnings on a packet of cigarettes and was upset beyond words that I might die as a result of smoking. Haven't touched one since and regard it as my best achievement in life.

As an aside my Uncle died in his 50's and was a heavy smoker and drank fairly large quantities of whiskey. After he had his first heart attack the doctor told him that the whiskey would kill him before the cigarettes.
So which is more dangerous?

I gave it up because it was becoming a bigger pain in the neck to buy the stuff as I got older. A couple of town moves, a group of friends all getting older and giving up coupled with a dislike of having to deal with neds all combined to get me off it. Smoked rollies for six months then, when I moved in with the FPO I gave it up completely.

I now find I can read books, remember stuff and no longer tolerate action movies. This is all good.

48 now. Gave up smoking during the day when I was 32, when I became a teacher. Now feel like smoking only if I have a drink, in which case it's a necessity. And since the hangovers are so bad these days, I only drink once a week. So it's taiing off..

When i went to work at an insurance company in the City in the late 60s. Embassy, then Embassy No 1 for choice, B & H if not available. The guy three desks down smoked Capstan Full Strength untipped, and when the sun shone through the windows, he'd vanish in his own blue fog. My section head would go through 80 a day, and leave his ashtray looking like a mini Mount Etna when he left for home. But virtually everyone smoked, from the post clerks to the department manager, and I carried on through my career. Got worse when i joined the TA - see remarks re fresh and foul air above - that morning fag as daylight filtered through the depths of an October training day morning. And when I went to work in Germany in the 80s, with kingsize ciggies at tax free prices, you couldn't afford not to smoke.
Finally knocked it on the head almost exactly 15 years ago as we speak, a combination of rising cost, and a sudden enforced stay in hospital to have my appendix out. Never really bothered me , giving up, and I'm glad I did, though, oddly, I am a little nostalgic for the smell of tobacco smoke in pubs. Still, for what it's worth, I wouldn't reccomend it.

not one, never remotely tempted in my 51.58 years on this planet.

Having said that, my parents generation all smoed in our family so I spent my youth at family gatherings like a laboratory beagle.

I've got down to about ten a day now, but I'm still smoking quite a lot.

I smoked for 20 years, the last few on roll-ups and a large pack (50gm or previously 2 oz) would only last me 3 days, if I was on tailor mades and I had a night out it could mean 50-60 a day, I was seriously thinking of getting a chimney fitted. Then in January 2001 I got fed up of walking into buildings and immediately looking for the smoking areas, fed up of that panic when the baccy was running low and it was a question of "Will it last until the morning?" I read the 'Allen Carr Easyway to Stop Smoking', stubbed out my last roll-up on 21st January at about 11:45pm, and I've never lit another.

My intolerance with smoking has increased ever since, at first I didn't mind people smoking next to me in my car even, nowadays I heave if I smell smoke on someone's clothes if they sit next to me on the tube, at a gig, a footy match, etc.

I truly believe it will be banned during my lifetime, if that's the case, then I'm glad - and proud - that I stopped for my own reasons when I did. I can empathise still with smokers and I pity them (in the true sense of the word), I'm not sure how I'd have coped with being a smoker and not be able to spark up in the pub.

I started when I was a teenager as a by product of smoking ‘erb to practice inhaling (my how stupid that sounds now…) and smoked off and on till I started work in a non smoking office. This established a lifetime habit of only smoking after work (no daytime cigs at all) and only with a drink. I smoked between zero and 10 a day depending on what I was doing, and only Golden Virginia rollies. If I was out in the pub and had no GV I wouldn’t have a tailor made. Very specific habit! I gave up for up to 4 years at a stretch a few times and started again. Then last summer, what I thought was a bite then thought was a zit grew on my temple which turned out to be some sort of potentially cancerous growth (98% benign / 2% kill ya) and having had it removed I decided that one experience of big C waving over the horizon was quite enough for one lifetime, and give up during the week the cut from the removal operation was healing. That was 18 months ago and I haven’t fancied one since. I wish I’d done it years earlier, but hey. My Dad and a few grandparents all died of Big C so I probably will too but I see no reason to encourage it. Also I’m going to buy a motorbike because you regret the things you didn’t do.

I don't inhale because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can't not hold one" - Woody Allen

I like songs about smoking thou

if I could smoke in my sleep I would.

So there!

My mother was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer. I gave up then. Maybe it will still kill me. Who knows. I know I only have myself to blame if it does. But if I ever come across an executive of a tobacco company in a dark alley......

I've tried patches, gum, lozenges, cold turkey, Allen Carr's book
(worked beautifully for 2 years until a moment of drunken stupidity). Today I got a month's supply of Zyban, so this time (ahem).
What seemed incredibly cool and edgy at 16 now seems incredibly dumb. And bloody hard to kick.

The last time I smoked a cigarette was at the last Word London meet-up. My smoking, whilst never heavy, has tailed off gradually to pretty much nothing. The ban sealed it, really. I have the very occasional one every year or so. If the wife's not looking. And only ever when drink has been involved.

My insurance policies are the big worry. They all list me as a non-smoker. If I die suddenly, (a risk since my father did the same, a victim of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) post-mortem blood samples are taken and analysed for 2,5 dimethylsulphuran (I think) to check for smoking. If the levels indicate recent smoking, the policies are invalidated.

29 years ago I smoked my last one.

I'd only been a smoker for 5 years but that night I'd had to get a doctor in the middle of the night cos I couldn't breathe. He injected me with what I later found out was Ventolin, but I was so shit scared I never had another one.

I still take a preventive puff from an inhaler every day, I never had asthma as a kid. Even though both my parents smoked - when I think back now it must have been an awful atmosphere, especially in winter with the windows closed.

And while generally I hate the smell of tobacco smoke, every now and then a fleeting whiff has a certain nostalgic reminder of my childhood

... (thanks to my dad, but that's another story). You can't get them over here in the US so I buy them online, 10 cartons at a time. I only have one carton left and I'm seriously thinking that now's the time to stop. Get through that carton and don't re-order.

I've been a 20 a day man for about 35 years. God, it's going to be hard.

I reply "yes, but I gave up when I left school at 16"

Smoking was very much a rite of passage. Just as buying your first underage pint, first packet of three and glimpsing your first Playboy centrefold. Not just for boys. My wife was in hospital again a few weekends back, being interviewed by a nurse armed with a bureacrat's questionnaire. Asked when she started smoking her answer was so matter-of-fact but shocking.

Eight.

She smoked when I married her. She tried to give up when her health suffered. She gave up in 2006 after pneumonia nearly killed her on a dream holiday in Los Angeles. She gave up again a month ago so that she could have oxygen cylinders at home. She knew it was killing her but was addicted. As was her late mother. As is her daughter.

There is no easy fix. Banning tobacco would not work. Production would go underground. Increasing taxes throughout Europe seems to work. Placing cigarette retail outlets on the top of hills might be a solution. Preaching to smokers? Not a chance. Tell them you love them but would love them more if they were to live longer. I wish I had.

At about 1:38.

Enjoying this thread as I am stopping today. I have to admit to enjoying my years as a smoker but the filthy habit has to stop... or so the FPO says... but for once she's right

I have ever worked for was a tobacco company. The offices were palatial. The air conditioning was so efficient and powerful that a non-smoker could sit in a small meeting room around the table with six smokers, all puffing away, without breathing in a single molecule of smoke. The reception area was paved with the finest Italian marble. The staff restaurant was staffed with several highly qualified chefs. All of the food was free. Almost everybody smoked at their desks. Engaging another expensive team of high profile IT consultants to deal with yet another minor change, or to attend to a middle manager's latest pet project, was the norm. They were sending teams of experts out into eastern Europe shortly after the collapse of the USSR to acquire farms and run-down factories. It didn't matter what the farms had been growing; they would be replanted with tobacco. It didn't matter what the run-down factories had once made (probably tractor parts); they'd be equipped to package fags.

If you need another reason to give up, do it to shaft these bastards.

Not sure if she does now ...

...... as a 10 year old watching my Irish nan die very slowly of lung cancer in Leicester Royal Infirmary back in the late 70s was enough to put me off for life - I recall the ward she was in was full of others gasping their last because of the gaspers, absolutely terrifying. If you're struggling to shrug the ciggies, try a visit to your local cancer clinic - you'll be leaving there like them German civvies who were forcemarched through the deathcamps by the Allies in '45.

Nearly all of my aunts and uncles on my anglo-Irish paternal side of the family smoked but crucially neither the old man nor my mam smoked - surely the greatest influence (other than stylish nouvelle vogue filums! Yer man earlier was right - JP Belmondo looked as cool as feck sparking up a Gitane); man, even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't have afforded them.

Its quite shocking to go abroad these days and sit in boozers where everyone is puffing away, here's hoping his Lordship doesn't reverse the ban as a inhaled balm for the cuts, eh?

I will say this though - probably two thirds to three quarters of my good friends down the years have been smokers, all of my pals when I first started drinking were serious tabhounds (I was probably breathing in the equivalent of a coupla burns most nights out), and the closest of my lifelong muckers are all fans of the baccy bar one, and even he was a 20 a day man until his gran caught the big C of the lung and a visit to l'hopital gave him a Damascene conversion.

Purely an anecdotal observation of my experiences, but smokers would seem to have an extra facet of socialibilty because of the very nature of smoking - you've always an 'in' for a conversational gambit, asking or offering a light and the like, always seemed useful when cherching pour une femme!

For example, an old acquaintance had a lighter used by naval types that had a complicated mechanism to expose the flame - when offering 'un feu' to a femme, he'd pass it over unopened, they would struggle to open it, he'd then gallantly do the honours (simmer!) and demonstrate the knack of activating it and thus had a conversational piece to strike up some banter.

Hrrhrr I still know fellas who to avoid foul luck, or any Jerry snipers still extant, will not use a flame to light a third tab!

BR
FT

Had a couple of years off not so long ago but got drawn back in due to booze I suppose. Now I'm on about 10 a day and I mostly enjoy them, especially with a glass of wine.
The only downside is the first one of the day where halfway through I enter a state of deep existential despair. This then goes on fag number two which I actually enjoy. I really miss smoking at gigs.

Some touching comments from several people above about watching loved ones dying from the effects of tobacco. Yet we're all going to go sometime, somehow. Sadly, most of those ways tend to involve pain, loss of dignity, emotional trauma for loved ones and so on. Although I have never smoked apart from the obligatory teenage experiment, I have always felt uneasy with the moral judgementalism that puritanical anti (and often ex) smokers display. It's fashionable to mock statements like 'my old Dad smoked 90 a day and lived to a ripe old age' but the sentiment holds true - people die from multiple causes every day. Sometimes it can be neatly attributed to a particular activity like smoking but more often it's genes or just random 'stuff'.

The above is playing devil's advocate to a certain extent as I've no desire to take up smoking. The grape and the grain will remain my poison of choice. However, I do admit to envying smokers their 'moment of contemplation'. It's the way that they can stand outside just thinking, staring into space, without self-consciousness. To me, that's what 'looks cool' about smoking.

Slim cigars, which I appreciate is generally a dirty old man's habit but I did acquire it from a dirty old man. Regardless, I enjoy all my bad habits, that is why I have them, and will stop only if I no longer enjoy it or it becomes too painful to carry on.

Anyway, something has to mask the smell of stale lager and BO that wafts out of pubs and clubs in these smoking ban days.

and I hate the smell of BO, farts and cheap lager.

But which is worse, there's only one way to settle it.......

I smoked for about 3 years full time when I was a student, prior to that I smoked socially when out drinking. I actually found it very easy to give up, I just stopped lighting up. My wife kept it up for a few years and it never really bothered me. My dad gave up just over a year ago after smoking for 40 + years, my mother still puffs away even though she has given up for years at a time in the past. I am really proud of dad for giving up, he was really starting to look ill and I thought he would not make retirement age.

...with an ashtray at my elbow, I gave it up.
Then this happened:

http://philipbryer.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-promised-some-time-ago-that-wh...