Smokers’ corner – cold turkey

“Stop being cranky” said my friend Lucy whilst I was furiously chopping potatoes. Well I’d love to, but 24 hours into nicotine deprivation can make you feel a little bit tetchy.

Leg jittering, fiddling with pens, playing the imaginary bongos at my desk have been my early coping strategies.

All I know is if you put a packet of fags at the bottom of a sleeping bag filled with lampreys and spiders, I’d probably crawl in head first without a second thought. That’s a craving, I guess.

48 hours doesn’t seem like a lot to you people situated outside of the confines of my brain, but I feel it is a good achievement for me - particularly as on two of the two days I have got rather magnificently drunk.

It’s funny how your perception of smoking changes by simply depriving yourself of it. I now jealously gaze at people smoking as if it were silky plumes of happiness itself, tasting of the finest Kobe steak cuddling their way out of their smug, privileged and selfish mouths.

Not a happy quitter today.

Thinking about yesterday’s musings on smoking, I consider the contrast to just a few days before. I’d be standing out in the cold battling against the wind to set fire to something in my mouth which would probably offer little more than slight nausea and the feeling in the mornings that someone has run a rusted cheese grater across the inside of my lungs.

According to fellow quitters, apparently I’m at the ‘three day hump’ and the cravings will subside from here. Hmmmm.

Having been selected as the ‘cold turkey’ lab rat I thought it would be helpful to see what assistance I could get that didn’t include pumping myself with nicotine through non-smokey methods. The NHS seem like a good place to start so I gave them a call on 0800 022 4 332.

I got through to a very nice chap who proceeded to ask me a seemingly unnecessary amounts of data collection questions such as “would it be ok if we were to pass your details on to the Department of Health for other related help services?” I replied “no”.

“I’m a LITTLE BIT TWITCHY HERE SO I DON’T SEE HOW A GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT SENDING ME A WALLCHART ABOUT AVOIDING AMOEBIC DYSENTARY IS RELEVANT TO THIS CALL, SIR.

“Sorry, I got out of bed on the wrong side of my lungs this morning.”

Once we’d gone through all of the questions he told me the crux of what the NHS has to offer me. They are sending me a DVD. Yes, a DVD. I’m going to reserve judgement until it arrives but I’m already thinking either a cheesy 80s style motivational video telling me to stand in front of a mirror repeating that I’m a strong confident woman and smoking doesn’t control me. Or perhaps an unnecessarily graphic shock video with an aggressive presenter shouting like Colonel Kurtz while holding up pictures of charred lungs or the one with the guy wearing the ‘meat scarf’ you get on cigarette packets.

I don’t think either of these would particularly help me, but maybe the good old NHS will prove me wrong.

Decided to call the NHS again as my DVD’s not here yet, which seems to miss the point of quitting if it takes seven days to get here - those seven days being the toughest?

Anyway, another source of help offered by the NHS on my second call was their ‘Together Program’. The name of this alone makes me think ‘fall back and trust me to catch you’ but he went on to explain that you get your own personal adviser with whom you agree a quit date.

They are then your non-smoking coaches who will send you motivational text messages and speak to you regularly. I can’t help but think that it would take some seriously profound text messages to curb a biological and mental substance addiction - but I’m willing to give it a try.

I am noticing that I’m a little less on edge today. The jittering has calmed down a lot and while I’m unsure how to actually quantify a craving so I’m not sure whether they’re still strong. All I know is if you put a packet of fags at the bottom of a sleeping bag filled with lampreys and spiders, I’d probably crawl in head first without a second thought. That’s a craving, I guess.

So far, I’ve been very facetious about these NHS measures I know - we’ll put that down to the crankiness again. To be fair to them, the NHS seem like they do have a number of different initiatives to try and assist but ultimately the process of quitting these dastardly little sticks lies squarely with my own brain and willpower. There’s only so much a third party can do to be a crutch to support me. It’s a lone wolf process.

So far, so good and, admittedly, so frustrating. I want to screech like a fallen toddler but I guess that’s half the battle. One week done, but the Notting Hill Carnival this weekend will be a big test Luckily our health and beauty editor will also be there so that should scare me off trying to have a sneaky one.