Express & Star

Stoptober: 'The month my habit will go up in smoke'

When you think about it, smoking is a bit of a silly habit.

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You'll struggle to find any sillier, to be honest, writes Pete Cashmore.

You take some dried plant leaves, roll them up in paper, set fire to them and inhale the subsequent fumes. Why would anyone willingly do that, knowing full well that it could ultimately make them very unwell?

Why indeed?

When it was suggested to me, an 8-10 a day man, that maybe I might like to give Stoptober a go, I jumped at the chance. Or at least, I would have done if I hadn't got out of breath.

Stoptober, which starts today, is a month in which smokers are encouraged to put down their lighters, empty their remaining smokes into the bin and go a month without sparking up, the theory being that once you've made it to the end of the month, it's much easier to then keep going.

That sounds pretty good to me. I'm quite fortunate in that I've never been a heavy smoker – I hear about people who manage to get through forty a day and find myself wondering how they even manage it. If the average lifespan of a cigarette is three minutes then that means they're setting aside two hours a day to spend huffing on gaspers. How do they even get anything done?

I also started uncommonly late in life. I never smoked in my teens, never smoked in my twenties, but eventually I found that a cigarette or two hit the spot nicely after a few glasses of red wine on a Friday evening, so I became that most annoying of companions – the one who doesn't want to buy his own cigarettes and so asks you if he can cadge one or two of yours.

Throughout all this, I still considered myself to be a non-smoker, even when, at the age of 39, I graduated to actually paying for my own cigarettes. If I was a non-smoker, I was one who was certainly wasting enough of his money buying menthol cigarettes.

The habit crystallised when I turned 40 and the magazine I was working for at the time announced that it was to close, with all staff being made redundant. All of a sudden, the smoking area at work became the place where staff members would go to formulate their plans for the future or just say angry stuff about senior management – I think half of the team took up low level smoking that month.

By the time I returned to Wolverhampton with my tail between my legs, there was no getting away from it – I was a habitual social smoker, frittering away thirty odd quid a week on things which give you bad breath, grubby fingers and ultimately kill you. It's not like I was even being seduced by attractive packaging, which nowadays carries stark warnings about the fate that awaits you if you don't quit.

Well, I decided that I don't want to be that guy who ends up needing assistance to breathe because of a silly habit he picked up in the pub. I want to be the guy who breathes in nothing but lungsful of clean air. Indeed, in Stoptober I decided that I also won't be drinking any alcohol and will be eating as healthily as I possibly can, because I figure that there's no point ridding myself of the poisons of cigarettes and then ending up in hospital anyway with diabetes or a dodgy liver. Interestingly, in addition to Stoptober, there's also a lesser-known alcohol version, Go Sober October, so I guess I'm effectively doing that too. I'm a one man abstention machine!

So I'm going full healthy. I'm not doing it for charity or anything like that, mainly because I don't think there's anything particularly noble or notable about what I'm doing, it's just common sense for someone my age if I want to make it into my dotage. Sorry, remaining gaspers, but you're going in the bin. And, all being well, you're not coming back.

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