It was in the early 1970s. I smoked at least 20 cigarettes a day, rising to 40 if it was busy at work, and as many as 60 when the pressure was on, or if there was a party. Early one morning, I was coming back from Paris, where my parents then lived. There was a rail strike in Britain - a common event then - and, after a sleepless night, four other stranded travellers and I decided to share a cab from Dover to London. It was around 6am. I was desperate for a fag, and asked my fellow passengers for permission to smoke. A grand, well-spoken woman announced, "Most certainly not!", and at that moment I decided that when I gave up - like almost all smokers I was in a permanent state of being about to give up - I would never, ever allow myself to become an anti-smoking bore.
This resolution has always been tough, and over the years it got tougher. For one thing, there is no such thing as an ex-smoker who becomes a non-smoker. Once you are a smoker, you are trapped for ever. You might be able to give up - in my case, I hope to the end of my days - but you are still a smoker in the way that a dry drunk is an alcoholic. It is easier to change sex than to cease being a smoker, though at least you can ameliorate the effects by not actually smoking.
I gave up a couple of years later. My boss and I, pursuing late-night beverages as always, heard sounds of revelry inside the Tory whips' office at the House of Commons. We finally left at 5am having consumed, along with other people, several bottles of scotch and most of a bottle of Blue Curacao, a fluid so fluorescently horrible that it might have been invented by the Temperance League to cure people of boozing. Next day I didn't wake up, though my brain returned to a primitive form of consciousness, and I decided there would never be a better moment to quit. Now I am not cured - nobody is - but the agonies have gone.
But it is a nasty, filthy, odious, vile habit. It does not just rot your lungs (and having seen one close friend die of lung cancer, his voice weakening, his skin falling back into his emaciated body, I would not wish that on my worst enemy, never mind on someone for whom I cared), it spoils life for other people. Go for a pleasant drink in the pub and you come home stinking of stale smoke. A bad moment for me came when I had lunch in Green's restaurant in Westminster. Princess Margaret was at the next table. She did not just smoke between courses; she smoked between mouthfuls. And she had that loathsome habit of holding the cigarette out at arm's length, so the smoke drifted away from her and into our nostrils. I am still ashamed of the fact that I did not complain at the time. What could she have done? Sent me to the Tower?
Smoking is not like drinking. Booze has its drawbacks, as a visit to any British town centre on a Friday night will demonstrate. But we drink wine and beer because we like it. People do not like smoking. They smoke because smoking is the only relief from the pain of not having a cigarette. It is a wholly negative pleasure. That is why there has been so little fuss over the ban. Most smokers are privately relieved that it might help them give up. (When, in the 1980s, Northwest Airlines in the US banned all smoking, it was predicted that it would lose business. In fact, passenger numbers improved so much that every other airline had to follow.)
And this is not a freedom issue. It is no stride on the long march to serfdom. Go to any meeting of Forest, the displeasing pro-tobacco lobby, and you will see that quickly. Their predecessors were no doubt around centuries ago defending the right of householders to empty their chamber pots into the street. Virtually all smokers know this. I cannot recall when anyone lit up in our house - or, more to the point, in anyone else's. Most guests would rather smoke outside in the cold and rain than ask their host for permission to light up. Smokers do not regard the ban as an infringement of their ancient liberties. They think of it as a helpful way to help them help themselves. And if they must, they can always smoke at home, or in the street, or under the patio heater outside the pub.
In America I saw this sign in an office: "My pleasure is beer, and this creates urine. Your pleasure is smoking, and this creates poisonous fumes. Don't pollute my air space, and I promise not to piss on your desk." Precisely.
· Simon Hoggart is the Guardian's political sketchwriter
Courtesy: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/may/14/health.smoking
