By Isle of Wight Observer
The council’s always banging on about being flat broke. That’s unsurprising, when most officers still get to retire in their 50s, with gold-plated pensions, while the rest of us to work till we drop to pay for it. If you’d like to join them, they’re currently recruiting a £26,000-a-year anti-smoking officer to help their own staff quit. It’s such a terrible idea, you wonder what else they waste our money on.
In 1985, Alan Carr wrote a best-selling book on quitting. ‘The Easy Way to Stop Smoking’ took the world by storm and it’s still available on Amazon, priced at £8.31. It’s so good, if the council can’t afford to buy a few staff copies, I’ll do it for them.
I read it about 30 years ago, a month after I’d quit. It was so convincing, I wished I hadn’t given up yet. Alan Carr was a 60-a-day man, who called stopping ‘the beautiful truth’. Frankly his insightful observation would work just as well for any addiction. In the first chapter, he writes about his daughter’s wedding day, and how it should have been the happiest of his life. It wasn’t, because during the church ceremony, all he could think about was getting outside for a fag. Looking around the congregation, he saw a sea of smiling faces; no-one else was thinking about cigarettes, only him. The rest were enjoying his daughter’s wedding. Only he was thinking of escape, and that was his lightbulb moment or ‘beautiful truth.’ Outside, he finally recognised that he had a nicotine problem affecting every aspect of his life.
Most of us smoked in the 70s; I started around 14. My Mum and stepfather were addicts, so lived in a permanent smoke-filled haze. I walked to school trailed by a cloud of fag smoke.
One morning, it occurred to me that my consumption was about to increase markedly. Because once I started work, I could smoke as many as I liked. Back then a pack of Marlboro cost just 40 pence, and I thought that was expensive.
Later, I developed a 20-a-day habit, although curiously, I didn’t smoke my first until early afternoon. The trigger was usually a bit of work-related stress. My ability to hold off all morning without bother encouraged me to believe that I could easily manage without them all day. After all, even hardened smokers sleep through the night without the need to light up. Shamefully, I had small children by then and smoked at home and in the car – with the windows open!
At his daughter’s wedding, Alan Carr realised it was just a costly addiction – no more, no less. I’ve heard smokers ridiculously describe the ‘must-have’ fag they enjoy ‘while relaxing.’ Or the fag they really need when they are ‘stressed.’ People claim they couldn’t live without an after-dinner smoke. Most daft, are those who say they need a reflective post-coital cigarette.
Smokers always justify their harmful habit with arrant nonsense. Like me, Alan Carr stopped without suffering because he wanted to. For just £8.31, the IW Council could easily give a copy of his incredible book to any employee spotted puffing outside their buildings. It’s a simple, low-cost solution, much better than paying someone £520 a week to yell, “Oi you, put that fag out!”
OK, maybe they’d also hand out some anti-smoking leaflets, nicotine patches and pictures of tar-blackened lungs. But if all that actually worked, our £26,000-a-year ASH officer would soon find themselves redundant, at even more cost to the taxpayer.
I once encouraged my mother to quit. Her response was, “Only strong-willed people still smoke; everyone else was pressured into quitting.” I suppose she had a point; no-one I know still smokes.