After a year of allegedly becoming a non-smoker, I have to admit I am in no way free of the shackles of nicotine. In fact I’m still loaded with the stuff via patches and gum which I chew all day, every day until my jaw aches.
Every morning, I wake up and the first thing on my mind is still a good cup of coffee with a cigarette. And I still suffer from bad temper and anxiety over the fear I’ll never be allowed to hold my comforting little friend again.
I know only too well the power of nicotine addiction. Having smoked my first cigarette at the tender age of 14, it has held me in its grip for 60 years. At my worst, I smoked 20 a day.
So my reaction on hearing the news of a daily pill, to be handed out free on the NHS, that will help you stop smoking, just as Mounjaro, Ozempic or Wegovy help you stop eating? Yes please, I’ll have some of that!
Varenicline (sold under the brand name Champix) promises to increase people’s chances of quitting and will, potentially, save thousands of lives every year.
The NHS is super-keen to offer it to 85,000 people a year in England, addicts whose smoking-related illnesses are a huge drain on its meagre resources.
Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, says the pill is a potential ‘gamechanger’ in the fight to tackle smoking.
It works, apparently, by reducing cravings for nicotine and blocking its effect on the brain (goodness knows how) as well as easing the withdrawal symptoms – the familiar sleepless nights and uncontrollable temper.
Do I really need another drug to help me do something I should be able to control with willpower? Am I really so weak that, already on Mounjaro to lose weight, I now need varenicline to liberate me from the grasp of nicotine?
I am not ashamed to say I think I do.
It’s exactly a year since I smoked my last cigarette. Last November, I was in hospital, lying in bed in terrible pain with a broken vertebra. I couldn’t get up and take myself out of the hospital for a sneaky fag. None of my family or friends was prepared to wheel me outside into the fresh air to indulge myself. I had no choice but to give up.
I thought it would only be a temporary period of denial. I could go back to normal once I got home, meanwhile I would plaster myself with nicotine patches and ensure a plentiful supply of nicotine chewing gum.
Unfortunately, what I hoped would be a short period of abstinence stretched and stretched. My two sons, insistent that I needed a longer period of rest and recuperation, booked me into a care home. No smoking there.
I sat for hours in my room in the home in Poole, Dorset, gazing out into the garden, watching endless queues of the nursing and care staff wander up the garden path to spend their half-hour break in the smoking hut. As they walked, they were carrying their packets, opening them, taking out the longed for cigarette, putting it into their mouth and lighting it as they approached the designated smoking zone. How I longed to be with them.
Nicotine addiction is pernicious. The two men to whom I was closest were my father and my grandfather. I learned to love the smell of nicotine on their clothes. I would sniff at their brown fingers, stained by the consumption of untipped woodbines. It was a vicarious pleasure, and I couldn’t wait to try it myself. Everyone at school thought smoking was elegant and cool.
Soon after my 14th birthday, left alone when Grandma was out shopping, I stole one of those untipped Woodbines from Grandpa’s pack. I lit it in the garden and puffed just as they did. I’ve never felt so sick and dizzy in my life, but I was not going to give up. I worked hard, with lots of practice at home, to be proficient enough at smoking to join the cool gang at school. I succeeded.
My father tried and failed to give up a million times. His lung cancer was discovered soon after his 80th birthday and I managed to find him a place in a hospice where he had wonderful palliative care. Some of the last words he spoke to me, just before he died, were: ‘Have you got a fag on you, love?’
I understand that need, that craving – even when it’s killing you. Smoking is the way I always used to start my day and a square of chewing gum is no replacement.
I tried a vape on the recommendation of a friend but hated it. It tore at my throat in a way no cigarette had since that Woodbine all those years ago.
Meanwhile, celebrities seem to be glamourising cigarettes again in the way Bette Davis did in my youth.
The singer Rosalia gave Charli XCX a bouquet of cigarettes on her birthday and the actor Paul Mescal says he refused to give up smoking when getting into shape for Gladiator II.
The ‘cigfluencers’, as they’re known, are leading young people in entirely the wrong direction. The young are taking up smoking because, they say, ‘It’s just what everyone does.’
Do we never learn?
They’ll cough and they’ll splutter and regret the day they ever allowed nicotine to take a hold. I remember many years ago being told by a doctor that nicotine was as powerful a drug as heroin for some people. I’ve no doubt I’m one of them.
If this new pill can stop nicotine controlling me, I will be on to my doctor tomorrow. I’ll be medicated for weight loss, for smoking and if anyone can come up with a pill to make me love doing exercise I’ll be the happiest woman hoping to stay alive!
Camilla’s a heroine for domestic abuse fight
I thought I could not admire Queen Camilla more – she conducted herself with grace and courage in the face of much criticism after marrying the love of her life. But I do. No one but her could have commanded an hour and a half of primetime television to reveal what happens to so many women behind closed doors.
She knows about domestic abuse – no longer referred to as domestic violence because the coercive control from which so many women suffer does not always involve beatings. She’s of my generation and remembers the silence that surrounded the crimes police referred to as ‘just a domestic’. She has informed herself about rape and has been a patron of SafeLives, a UK-wide charity dedicated to ending domestic violence, since 2020.
She’s visited a refuge for women suffering domestic abuse and was inspired to help end a crime where at least one women a week is killed by a current or former partner and victims are three times as likely than their peers to try to take their own life.
During my years on Woman’s Hour, I saw how things slowly changed for the better as new laws were introduced, but no one has done what Camilla has done. She’s given survivors of domestic abuse a voice and she’s using her power and influence to help vulnerable women. We could not have hoped for a better Queen.
I’ll have your unfashionable pud!
Stir up Sunday is in ten days’ time – on November 24. It’s a day I used to spend with my grandmother as we prepared the Christmas pudding. My mother didn’t bother, thinking Marks & Spencer would suffice.
I doubt many people this year will make their own or even buy one. In my house, I may be the only one who loves Christmas pudding with home-made rum sauce – but if necessary, I’ll eat the lot.
Why is everyone so afraid of giving us the right to choose to end our suffering? The assisted dying bill is far too nervous. Two doctors and a high court judge to approve? And you have to be six months away from death with a terminal illness?
I fear too many MPs are too young to have sat by the bed of a relative begging in abject pain for help to die, and so they will think it’s the humane thing to do to vote against. It’s not.
Why I said no to the Jungle
Only Coleen Rooney and Oti Mabuse are recognisable faces in the I’m a Celebrity camp. Good luck to them both.
I was asked to do it some years ago with quite a handsome sum on offer. I said no. Why would I want to eat disgusting things, be covered in bugs, all in the company of people with whom I’d have nothing in common?
Eight nurses in Darlington are taking their NHS trust to court in their fight for a safe single-sex space in which to change into their uniforms.
A transgender nurse has been allowed to share their changing room and they are quite clear that they don’t want to change in front of a biological male. Good luck to them.
