Another year over. Almost. Christmas symbolises a kind of ‘getting ready to welcome the new year’, a process that gives a week of reminiscing about the old one before the new one starts. Which also means most of the journalists can have the week off as all the papers publish for 7 days is lists of who did what in 2013, who died, who starred, big events. All of which can be prepared nicely in advance so that ‘Fleet Street’ can have a nice break. Or spend the entire week in a drunken stupor. Which, for journalists, is a bit of a busman’s holiday anyway.

So Mandela died. In case you’ve been asleep for 4 weeks and missed all the excitement. Murray won Wimbledon. Spurs sacked another manager. We made ‘nice’ to China. In exchange for the promise of 57 zillion quid in investments. The ‘arab spring’ turned into the arab winter. Oscar Pistorious killed his bird. A future king was born. A new pope was invented; looked like all the others, little old man wearing a white dress. Jennifer Lawrence won an oscar; she’s so fab she could have won the European Cup or a Nobel Prize. They bombed the Boston marathon. Nice. And I gave up smoking.

Wow. That’s a big one.
The easiest way to give up smoking is never to start. But I managed to miss that opportunity when presented to me, at school, behind the cycle sheds, and instead opted for a life in Marlboro-land. And smoking was so socially acceptable in the 70s that doctors did it, in surgery, politicians would inhale publicly, the Queen would give her speech with a Dunhill in one hand (ok, I made that up), and you could smoke on trains, buses, whilst playing football, in cinemas, people’s houses, even restaurants and pubs. What a smelly fucking world it was. But I embraced my inner fag-hag and managed to defer all attempts by family and children to make me cease and desist.

And yes, I had become vaguely aware of certain health implications that concerned the wellbeing of smokers, but it was what I did. Smoked. ‘Because I loved it’. Love… addiction… same difference.

Intellectually I wasn’t a smoker. Heaven forbid. My body’s a temple. Which only used smokeless fuel. Its stupid, pointless, expensive, daft, limp and quite frankly insane.

So I smoked when I wasn’t being intellectual. Which is in fact most of the time. Yet I knew deep down that some day I’d quit. Just not ‘today’.

Then they invented electronic cigarettes as an aid to stopping smoking and on June 20th I started sucking on little electric devices. e-cigs. When I didn’t have one handy pretty much any electronic device would do. I’d suck on an ipod, ipad, phone, tv, pc, anything that carried charge. But it worked and haven’t smoked ‘properly’ since that fateful day.

The e-cigarettes carry nicotine. But no tar, no shit, no rubbish. Thus I’ve managed to convert my addiction really nicely. I no longer suck on paper; just plastic and metal. And that’s good.

Do I feel better for quitting the weed? I never really suffered with coughs or breathlessness anyway, so rather than ‘better’ I just feel ‘morally superior’. Do I suffer mood swings and tempers? FUCK OFF!!!!!

So have a lovely happy Christmas. I’m off to Mexico tomorrow morning to put Mrs Conway in the sunshine for a few days, but you may be hearing from me. Though it may be in Spanish.

Manyana

A xxxx