Fat Cars

A car parking space measures 4.8 x 2.4m

Many cars are now longer than a parking space however it’s the increasing width that’s really the big issue.

I remember the days when, as a motorcyclist, I could easily filter through rows of stationary traffic – now I barely can, there’s insufficient space.

In 2019 with the growing pressure on our road infrastructure why are our cars getting wider and why are most of us ferrying 3 or 4 empty seats around with us on our daily commute?

A passing alien could only be amused to see our daily congestion being caused by our desire to transport 3 vacant seats around with us on every journey and then struggle to find, or pay through the nose, to park those seats for the day.

Roads are not going to get any bigger. Cars, that are getting wider, parked at the roadside are making the roadway narrower for wider cars such that what used to be a 2 way street with cars parked either side is now a single carriageway with congestion.

It’s time that personal transport became a lot smaller.

Hurty Feet

Why do my feet hurt? 

I think I’ve possibly two hundred pairs of shoes, maybe, I’m not really counting. I’ve definitely got five or six pairs of running shoes and went through a period of running longer and longer and slowly wearing them out. I ran a 10k, I ran a half-marathon, I ran a marathon yet my feet didn’t hurt. Much of me did but it wasn’t my feet.

Now, whether wearing old shoes or new shoes my feet hurt when I run anything further than about 8k, really hurt, they’re very sore underneath.

Have I finally worn out my feet?

Dig the Grave

Cigarettes are just a delivery system for getting nicotine into the bloodstream, it’s that simple!

Have we heard that before? Are we ignoring the elephant in the room that is NRT?

There are two giants involved, Tobacco & Pharma and both will spend flippin’ great wads of cash to make sure you buy their products, ignoring the also-rans in this case, cigarettes and NRT. They have the power to alter opinion and fund the research required to justify their sales. We've known for years now that quit rates tend to stabilize well below 10% for all methods and even the most careful of statistical manipulation just alters tiny relative factors to favour one produce slightly in one bit of research.

It’s easy to educate a primary school child that smokers suck on a drug-filled fag to get the effects of the drug and need to repeat this at regular intervals as the drug wears off. Given a boring weekend I could probably teach my dog that.

This entire concept fuelled the disastrous ‘therapeutic’ nicotine rollercoaster.

Give the smoker nicotine from an alternate source; let’s say a transdermal patch and they’ll have no wish to smoke. Hmmm, that’s strange, they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag.

Ok, it’s not the nicotine per se it’s also the delivery method, let’s put nicotine in a gum and they’ll get bursts of nicotine just like a fag! Hmmm, that’s strange; they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag.

It’s the chewing, let’s stick it in a lozenge and it’ll dissolve for a burst in the mouth experience! Oh dear, that’s strange, they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag.

Aaaah, we’ve got it, let’s make a plastic fag type thingy with nicotine in it and they can pretend to smoke it, that’s bound to work? Hmmm, that’s strange; they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag.

I tell you what we haven’t tried, let’s shove some nicotine in a bottle and every time they want a fag they can just squirt it in their gob, no way can that fail. Hmmm, that’s strange; they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag.

At this point the ultimate in NRT comes along and it’s not even made by Pharma. 

Hello E-Cig you’re the answer to our needs. Here we have a digital smoke. We vaporize nicotine; inhale it into our lungs with none of the harmful side effects of tobacco. We can blow smoke rings, use it in the pub and the end even lights up!  Hmmm, that’s strange; they’re still smoking, still gagging for a fag!

There must come a point when the head scratching starts and someone asks, “are you sure we've understood this nicotine thing correctly.”

When smokers are wandering around totally dosed up on nicotine and it’s leaking out of every pore and pooling around their ankles yet they’re still gagging to smoke it’s a little bizarre to tell them that they only want to smoke because they clearly are craving more nicotine!

It’s not even speculative. We know that nicotine therapies don’t help people quit yet people fall for their scam time and time again.

Just how long are we justified in flogging a dead horse before we give it a decent burial?

Failing to Fail.

You’re happily smoking your Mayfairs, Richmonds or Marlboros and you’re finding it a financial squeeze. You buy some rolling tobacco and filters and other paraphernalia and master the art of ‘rollies’ but weirdly keep falling off the wagon back onto your proper fags. Sometimes you manage a day or two and one or twice you seem to become 100% rollie but then months into the change suddenly find yourself smoking real ones again.

You’re happily smoking your Mayfairs, Richmonds or Marlboros and you’re finding it a financial squeeze. You buy an E-Cig, some juice and other paraphernalia and master the art of ‘vaping’ but weirdly keep falling off the wagon back onto your proper fags. Sometimes you manage a day or two and one or twice you seem to become 100% E-Cig but then months into the change suddenly find yourself smoking real ones again.

I like E-Cigs. They've given us a new touchstone with which to compare our habits and addictions.

If you smoke and you think you smoke because your body is demanding nicotine at regular intervals then delivering that nicotine using a cigarette, a rollie or an E-Cig should make no difference at all.

The fact that it makes a huge amount of difference should have us questioning everything we think we know about smoking.

Where's that house I smoked?

Ok, it’s not the most brilliant maths but you’ve got to accept the principle. Inflation changes, taxation changes, wages change and the cost of tobacco changes but the average working smoker spends 1% of their income on smoking.

Every year we smoked a really good holiday or a nice car every few years. Smoke long enough and you’ve smoked a house and for what – just so that you can feel like someone that has never smoked?

As lunacy goes that’s not a bad example...

The Switch

When we started smoking we did something that our bodies opposed with every means at its disposal.
The inhalation of smoke contradicts everything that our lungs evolved to do and the natural response is to gag and retch, turn green and reject it totally. When we smoke fag number 100,000 our body's reaction is just the same as that first one. The fag tastes just as awful but we have simply learnt to accept it.
The smoking hasn't changed, it is our perception of smoking that's changed.
Luckily there's a switch in our heads that can be changed from smoker to non-smoker; unfortunately it's not labelled and finding it is not always straightforward.
Some people quit instantly and painlessly, often due to some external stimulus. Pregnancy, a smoking related death or a Doctor's grave warning are often the catalyst to quitting smoking. Often a smoker will simply wake up one morning and no longer wish to smoke. Sometimes they start the day as normal but by bedtime have ditched the habit.
Call it an epiphany, a light-bulb moment or finding the switch, either consciously or unconsciously, it doesn't matter what you call it but it's an essential goal.

It's also a massive beacon that needs to illuminate anyone thinking of quitting, struggling with a quit or thinking of leaping off the wagon. Its message is obvious; lots of people quit "just like that", no side effects, no major withdrawal, no real hassle, done, dusted.

So what are they doing?

Often we labour with our quits, day after day, slowly easing the spring-loaded switch from on to off only to have it leap back to the on position the moment we lose focus. We're told quitting is hard. Non smokers think quitting is hard. Even school kids think quitting is hard. It's easy then to assume it must be hard and that we should somehow accept a titanic struggle if we're to succeed.
Quitters who don't have a hard time are therefore regarded as somehow freakish.
It's easy to forget, ignore or disbelieve the fact that of every 100 smokers approaching their GP for help 93 will be smoking 12 months later.
If that system sits comfortably with you feel free to jump on the bus; you may be one of the lucky 7.
Of course, having read this you've now more chance of being one of the 7 as it could be that the other 93 will never know we all have a switch!
It would be fabulous if the switch was operated by our conscious and had a big neon label saying, "off". Sadly it doesn't. Consciously we may be totally committed to quitting the fags and that's by far the usual way. We make a conscious decision to try to stop and then follow the path to the best of our ability. If we struggle we already know it's not meant to be easy and if we fail it just confirms our initial thought that quitting is hard.
Reinforcement of a tough quit is unlikely to make the next one any easier!

We quit in the subconscious. At some point in our conscious quit the subconscious picks up on the message that smoking is no longer an option and the struggle lessens.
The good bit is that it's not just some wild theory; we can all find people who've quit totally painlessly and they tend to be one of the examples shown above.
The bad bit is that even armed with the knowledge it's hard to find the switch.
Hypnotherapy must be the first port of call as it's exactly that profession's job to work with the subconscious. Failing that just the knowledge of why we actually smoke can be enough to flick the switch. Alternatively just lurking in the quitting environment reading forums and blogs can possibly let the subconscious pick up on something of benefit.
Having a big bag of drugs and a conscious desire to quit just puts you at the start of the path, it doesn't mean you'll get to take a second step.

Lace up your boots and seek out the switch.

It's raining so I'm ranting...

Hmmmm. The day I stopped smoking I tossed a butt out of the car window and said to myself, “I’m sick and tired of this.” Seeking solace on the internet that morning I came across Allen Carr’s ‘Scandal’, his literary attack on the nicotine replacement industry and the sycophants that prescribe it. Weirdly, despite recommending that people read it, I’ve yet to read his “Easyway” although I did like the review, “He bored me into quitting.”
I suppose in many ways it was his book ‘Scandal’ that cemented my quit and got me over that initial quitting hump and for that I’m grateful to him. The biggest problem I ever had with AC was that he was wrong. Sure, religion is wrong and plenty believe in that but my focus was on smoking not religion and AC left me with a load of questions unanswered, or simply answered in an unsatisfactory manner and my faith was getting shaky. Luckily his approach didn’t mean you had to believe it all and the questions I asked were questions maybe he'd never really thought about.


Obvious ones like;
Why do I need to smoke to relax and my wife doesn’t? 
Am I more relaxed than her? 
Is she always stressed?
If I was the addict he said I was then why was I not troubled by long-haul flights? 
Why did I jump in my car and find fags late at night despite having some left in my packet and I could have simply picked up more in the morning? 
Why was it so hard to switch from fags to rollies and so easy to slip back on to fags again? 
Why did I light one off the other lying on a Greek beach? 
Why didn’t I wake up in the middle of the night just to smoke? 
Why could I drive from A to F with my family and not smoke but if alone I smoked at B, C, D and E? 
Why does my mother in law only smoke at parties?
Why does Steve only smoke at the weekend?
How is this possible?


All these simple questions had relatively simple answers but non of the answers were, “because you’re a nicotine addict and you smoke to get the drug nicotine from a cigarette to avoid withdrawal from that drug.” That answer doesn’t fit, it doesn’t even come close.
No matter how big a crowbar you buy you cannot persuade ‘nicotine addiction’ to be the answer. That’s when you realise that despite a good attempt he hasn’t quite got it right.
All he had to do (I think) was to do a search and replace of nicotine with smoking and he may have solved it. It even sorts out the unanswered questions!
Having exhausted Mr Carr I ended up at whyquit.com Now these guys are really intense, obsessive even and they too blame everything on our friend nicotine. Sadly they work on the “nicotine is the answer, now what’s the question” method and go to fascinating and convoluted lengths to manipulate the question to fit the answer.
These are the sort of chaps that thrive on anti-nicotine with a vengeance. These are the shoe-bombers in the nicotine-patch factories who evict you from their forum if you have a slip or a blip. They may even come round in the night and vandalize your car or flower-beds too just to make sure you know that they mean business.
They do not like nicotine. 


Where did the nicotine persecution come from?
Why is nicotine blamed for tar staining. Why is nicotine brown a recognised colour!
Ask for an elephant flavoured ice-cream and people would laugh you out of the shop. Nicotine has simply become part of our very psyche- so much in fact that even non-smokers know all about it.


They forget to mention that your body, well your brain, is a lying, cheating, scumbag. It’s not something I gave a lot of thought to before I gave up smoking but you need something like quitting to focus your mind. Your brain will introduce fear of quitting concepts even before you’ve quit. You can smoke your “last” cigarette and less than five minutes after finishing it start feeling the effects of withdrawal: achy muscles, anxiety, shaky hands, panic. That’s just after five minutes. While the nicotine (that you’re addicted to) from the last fag was still meandering around your bloodstream and ambling its way towards your brain.
People who happily sleep smoke-free for eight hours have trouble consciously not smoking for an hour. Real physical withdrawal symptoms manifest themselves without the body being deprived of the drug. It’s no wonder that quitting smoking can be difficult.
Is fear of quitting like fear of falling? How high do we have to climb before fear kicks in?
If I’m feeling adventurous at work I can spend the afternoon climbing between desks without much fear of terminal demise. Similarly I can let junior leap between beds in the Travelodge without being considered a poor parent. However, start to raise them from the ground and there becomes a point where leaping four feet between desks becomes a most daring proposition. The relative positions of the desks hasn’t changed but the brain, working on some automated self-preservation setting, decides that eight foot is just ok, eighty feet is out of the question.


And whilst leaping between beds in the Travelodge let’s have a brief think about sex.
Under no external stimulus we can go from watching Coronation Street to rampant sex on the sitting room floor (not from personal experience you understand- I hate Coronation Street) merely by thinking about it. Purely by self-altering the chemical balance in the brain we can switch from mild-mannered middle management to lust-crazed sex maniac. 
My degree wasn’t in biology so I’ve no idea what actually happens in the head when that process of sexual arousal starts. No doubt something ending in ‘ine’ is released from something slimy that bonds with something squidgy and before you know it there’s an increase in heart rate and a canoe appears in my trousers.
My point (I occasionally have one) being that the urge to smoke, like the urge to feed and the urge to have sex, is a real physical need created in the head in response to the right stimulus.
That urge can make people do awful things. It also makes us smoke.


Quitting is a doddle with the right tools, the first of which is an open mind.


Sadly bringing those tools to the masses is nigh on impossible when the experts are wrong.