I smoked my last ever cigarette on March 16th, 2017. I’m coming up on nine years as a reformed Silk Cut devotee. Whenever anyone congratulates me on my nine smoke-free years I feel compelled to admit that my father died of metastatic lung cancer – a direct result of smoking – in 2008 and I continued to puff away for almost a decade.
I gave up smoking, not because of this tragic and traumatic family history, but because I wanted to. I hadn’t planned that my last cigarette would be my last. I just remember feeling slightly sick on a smoke-heavy night out, looking down at the fag in my hand and thinking “what am I doing?”. I felt grey and filthy; I decided to try a week…