Don't try this at home

It's been three days and a couple of hours since I stopped smoking. And I'm hating it!

It's not the first time either. I've been on and off cigarettes for the past 15 years. The longest break I had was a couple of years. but somehow I always get back into the old habit. You know how it is: you're in a pub, everyone else is smoking so it doesn't really make a difference if you have one, and so it goes. The next day you just finish the ones left in the packet. Then you just get a packet of ten, just for special occasions. And after a couple of days every coffee break is a special, bloody occasion.

So I'm a veteran of failed attempts to quit smoking. And now I'm trying again. The difference is that this time my reasons are quite different from before. There are, naturally, some of the same factors that you encounter in a country like Finland every winter: at some point you just start feeling like a mug standing outside in the rain or snow, freezing your ass off, and sucking on fag, while other are enjoying healthy life indoors.

But this time there is another reason. More pressing than the usual ones. Now I'm simply fed up of going for a cigarette at work, not because of the facilities (which are crap by the way, but as a smoker you learn to live with that) but because of the endless whining and whinging that goes on there. I mean, half the fun of having a fag at work is that you can have a break from your work. But when you go out and all that people are talking about is how horrible their jobs are, it's just too much for me. I'm not kidding, it's like the old Monty Python sketch about the moaning yorkshiremen: "Oh, my job is so shite, I have to work 20 hours a day for 10 cents per hour". "You have it so good. I have to work round the clock, and they don't even pay me". "But that's nothing, I have to work 30 hours a day, 8 days a week, and pay to even get into the building!" It's fun for the first couple of days but then it starts to get to you.

So, it's no more cigarettes for moi. I will start a new, healthy life, free from all the moaning and whinging. Maybe as an added bonus my blood circulation will return to normal and my hands and feet will stop feeling so bloody cold all the time.

That's the plan, anyway. I'll let you know if I fall off the wagon.