Alexis Petridis smoking his e-cigarette – move over, Marlboro Guy. Photograph: Andrew Hasson for the Guardian
I can pinpoint the actual second when I determined to cease smoking. It was one night last October. I was standing in the garden, courageously operating my way via a Marlboro Menthol, undeterred by the fact that I had a chest infection. The rain was virtually horizontal: amongst that and the explosive cough that every other drag occasioned, it was fairly tough to hold the cigarette alight.
A significantly less dogged guy would have stopped and taken his wheezing chest indoors. But I was caught with cigarettes, even though I had cut down from twenty a day to a mere five some many years ago. I stuck with them even when the cost grew to become ludicrous – a week prior to, at a kiosk in central London, I had barely received adjust from a tenner. I had caught with cigarettes despite the wellness warnings and the photo on the packet of the guy with the cancerous development on his throat, and the encounter my wife produced when the fiscal adviser mentioned the expense of lifestyle insurance coverage. What was a bit of rain and a hacking cough? I was not going to be denied the basic pleasure of smoking, even when it was evidently a profoundly unpleasant knowledge.
And then it hit me: what the hell was I performing? It wasn’t just that I was unwell and creating myself worse by performing one thing that stood a honest opportunity of killing me, even though the health dangers had been more and more challenging to put out of my mind: two pals had been diagnosed with cancer (neither was smoking-connected, the two survived, but nonetheless). It was a lot more that I all of a sudden appeared to catch sight of myself. Like, I suspect, nearly each teenager who starts smoking, I had taken up the habit because I thought it was great. Despite the best efforts of anti-smoking campaigners, common culture is still packed with images, albeit old ones, of people who looked very good with a cigarette in their hand: the Beatles Bob Dylan the Ratpack Miles Davis innumerable French actors in nouvelle vague movies David Bowie on the cover of Young Americans, or, even much better, onstage as the Thin White Duke, the blue packet of Gitanes protruding from his waistcoat pocket the only flash of colour in his monochrome outfit.
I suppose I was subconsciously labouring underneath the impression that, if I smoked, some of their awesome would transfer itself to me. A mere 25 years later on, I realised that it undoubtedly hadn’t. I wasn’t Jean-Paul Belmondo, insouciantly reaching for a submit-coital Gitanes whilst Jeanne Moreau or Anna Karina slumbered subsequent to him. I was a 42-year-old man on a patio in Brighton in the tipping rain, sporting his wife’s cagoule, and the final time I had coughed, a lump of mucus had shot out of my mouth and landed on my foot. What the hell was I carrying out? That was it: I was packing in.
I clearly didn’t have the willpower to quit with out some variety of crutch. Part of me did not actually want to quit at all. I loved the taste of cigarettes, the smell of their smoke, I linked them with events and exciting, calm moments of solitary reflection and conspiratorially gossipy conversations. So I opted for an e-cigarette, which, as my wife was swift to point out, isn’t genuinely giving up so significantly as swapping one particular addiction for one more, much less harmful a single, which explains why they are so successful.
Even so, the life of the vaper isn’t with out small privations. If the argument that e-cigarettes will in the long run lure youngsters into smoking seems specious, I suspect that’s largely due to the fact the one thing that smoking an e-cigarette certainly doesn’t do is make you appear great. Quite the opposite: whatever the health advantages, it feels faintly pathetic whipping out an e-cigarette when the people around you are smoking the real thing, like turning up at the Giro d’Italia on a bike with stabilisers.
If an aura of amazing has somehow clung to cigarettes despite the ideal efforts of anti-smoking campaigners – despite the reality that the most noticeable pro-smoking campaigner in Britain is at the moment Nigel Farage, a man with all the insouciant awesome of a toddler on a bouncy castle – then the opposite looks to be accurate of e-cigarettes. From the outset, when they had been introduced to Britain by a businessman called Greg Carson, who attempted to industry them below the regrettable name Electro Fag, a particular naffness has been hard to shake. In my case, said naffness has been exacerbated by the fact that, yesterday, I managed to knock my e-cig on to the floor, breaking off the button that activates it: until finally I replace it, the only way I can get it to perform is by jabbing the area where the button employed to be with a ballpoint pen. Performing this, I uncover myself reflecting that I’m clearly some distance from the effortless fag-in-hand awesome of the Ratpack or Miles Davis. If Bowie in Thin White Duke mode had sauntered onstage with the intro of Station to Station blaring moodily, then whipped out an e-cigarette and began frantically prodding it with a pen to make it operate, I am reasonably specific that iconic status would have been more difficult to come by.
But it does not matter, since the e-cigarette operates. After 25 many years, I have stopped smoking cigarettes. It hasn’t conquered my addiction to nicotine, but it has altered my perspective to cigarettes. I know this because of the 1 time since October when I faltered. En route to interviewing a heavy metal band in Las Vegas, I mislaid my e-cig. With, I have to admit, a specific excitement, I decided I did not have time to change it and instead bought twenty Marlboro Menthol. I lit one, and to my horror, it tasted disgusting: I had got utilized to the lighter, sweeter flavour of the e-liquid vapour (I use RY4, which adds a delightful hint of caramel and vanilla to the tobacco-flavour base). Worse, it produced me feel disgusting, swim-headed and nauseous, which I suppose is down to the chemical substances present in fags that aren’t there in e-cig vapour.
So I did anything that the guy in his wife’s cagoule, coughing his guts up in the rain, would have regarded as an act of lunacy: I threw a virtually complete packet of cigarettes in the bin.
