Stub out the habit

"Tsk, tsk," my editor Lindi would say, just as I'd slink into my seat after a quick puff out the back to ease the strain of deadline day.

And then came the guilt bit. "You could have visited your little brother in Australia with the amount of money you waste on those things," she'd spit, eyeing the fag packet in my hand.

"So when are you going on the course?" she'd say.

"Soon," I'd whimper, before quickly changing the subject.

But there was no getting out of it it was an assignment after all.

When the chance of a couple of hundred pounds worth of smoking therapy to finally nail the habit landed on my desk, I'd like to have said that I jumped at the chance. I didn't.

Don't get me wrong. I agreed to it. Partly because, as one of the few remaining smokers in the office, there weren't many candidates up for the job. But also because, like every smoker, I did plan to get around to giving up some day. Just not now.

Later Kim Bennett ,course co-ordinator of Allen Carr's Easyway To Stop Smoking, tells me I'm not alone.

She recounts a tale of how Allen Carr, the give-up' guru she bases her courses on, offered a life's supply of cigarettes to anyone who gave him a year's cigarette money up front. He swears that not one person took him up on his challenge.

So I didn't make a dash for the diary.

Instead I planned it for some un-fixed date in the New Year and ran off to lunch, buying a pack of 20 on the way Safe in the knowledge I'd soon be free of the weed, I puffed away and forgot all about it.

But Lindi didn't forget quite so easily. The New Year came and went, as did my birthday. I knew I didn't want to be celebrating either doing cold turkey. Hadn't I heard somewhere that nicotine was more difficult to kick than hard drugs.

Later Kim explodes this myth too. How, she begs the question, can a fab meal with friends be enhanced with a fag in hand. Of course it's plainly pathetic to think how an evening doing two of the most fun things in the world can descend into panic with the sight of a non-smoking sign. But we've all been there.

Kim likens the process of addiction to a bee seeking nectar in a flower. First the bee likes the taste and comes back for more, flitting just beyond the cavity, but one day without realising it, she's sucked in. Such is the sneakily quiet process of addiction.

She didn't need to tell me. The memory of my last attempt at giving up still lingered.

A couple of glasses of red wine and a shot or two was all it took for me to turn into Homer Simpson, monosyballic with deprivation. But instead of doughnuts my goggled eyes were seeing cigarettes everywhere. How pathetic.

The disturbing reality of what I was slowly beginning to accept as an addiction hit home when one lunchtime, with only a few pounds on me, I was forced to choose between lunch or cigarettes. Every smoker has been there. There was just one giant hurdle standing in the way of a fag-free life I really enjoyed smoking.

And you don't need to be a therapist to know that if your heart ain't in it...

Was there any hope for someone like me?

Having lived and puffed my way through the countless brutal advertisements that have become standard fare in the 21st century, my skin had toughened up.

Us puffing pariahs know there's no place for us with the anti-smoking lobby swelling by the day. But aren't we a fickle bunch all the same. Just a few hundred years back when Sir Walter Raleigh, so legend has it, arrived with tobacco in tow, the stuff was welcomed as medicinal. Schoolboys at Eton would open up their tobacco boxes at morning break to enjoy a smoke with their masters, while doctors in the 1700s hailed it as protection against the plague, especially first thing in the morning. And with the move to recreational came men putting pipes to their lips, philosophising and offering tobacco as they would malt whiskey. But with the glamour gone up in a puff of smoke, Kim's method sounded interesting. And when she told me I'll be smoking right the way through the session, I liked the sound of it more and more.

From the off it is worth noting that everyone else parted with £200 of their hard-earned cash to go on the course.

I didn't. And, of course, handing over that sort of money says lots about determination.

After meeting Kim in the reception of a local hotel, I've no problems finding my group. I just follow the cloud of smoke hovering above the cafe area. Armed with a box of 20, on Kim's advice, we'd all meet there at regular intervals throughout the afternoon to puff away.

The session echoes that of any addiction group.

Except whereas say, sex or alcohol, at least before they start having a negative impact on your life, give some real pleasure, nicotine never really does.

For most people that first one as a teenager was sickening at best and us smokers really struggle when it comes to pinning what exactly it is about smoking that gives us pleasure.That's the thing about smoking. It's the tease of all teases. Doing it merely makes you want to do it even more. A friend once remarked how one of her pals loved smoking so much, she thought about lighting a second with one already ablaze between her lips.

We have a craving, have a fag, think it satisfies us, when in actual fact, it does the opposite. The thing with fags is we never find what we're looking for.

As Kim explains, cigarettes are designed to leave us in a constant state of dissatisfaction, caught up in a sinister loop, much to the satisfaction of the tobacco companies. With each cigarette, we coast just below normality before the buzz' that indefinable pleasure starts to wane. Then we reach for another fag. And throughout all we really want to feel is normal like someone who sits in a bar without ever thinking of a cigarette.

It seems the most obvious thing in the world, but Kim's hard-hitting way with words definitely drives the message through.

My group is a mixture of hardened 60-a day smokers down to your very casual, once in a blue moon smoke whose restraint and self-control is a wonder to me.

Kim, an ex-smoker herself, asks all of us why we smoke and what it actually gives us.

And then she drives a bulldozer through our reasons, from stress relief (it's the fags that leave us stressed) to confidence (being a slave to cigarettes destroys confidence).

We all have our excuses but Kim insists: "It's fear and depression that lurks underneath every one of your decisions to have another cigarette. See it for what it is.

"Addiction is based on fear the fear that we are not going to enjoy our lives without this crutch. Do we want to be driven by that."

Kim asks us to keep a list of our reasons for quitting, and to refer to it whenever we felt our resolve wavering.

Cash figures big on my list anyway. Sixteen cigarettes can cost up to £5.50 in a bar. There's nothing like the idea of being taken for a ride to make our blood boil. And hearing about the trap, set by the tobacco industry, prepared to strip me of my cash and health until I die, really got me angry.

Kim says: "It's a lifetime's worth of brainwashing. Do not let these big tobacco companies take your money and give you death in its place. If I was a drug-dealer and I said to you that I've got this new product. It will kill you, knock your confidence, destroy your immune system, it doesn't give you anything but the minute you have one you will want another one and another one."

As Kim fires round after round of her anti-smoking ammunition and there's plenty that sense of being the biggest idiot in the world is indisputable.

She tells us: "There is nothing to give up. It will kill you unless you kill it. Just think, thank God I do not have to do that any more.

Our lives become so much more enjoyable when we're not a slave to this thing. That's what we are. We think we're free but not compared to a non-smoker. Cigarettes will give you cancer. Fact. And it's not just us but the people that we live with, the people that we love. Two thousand people die a week, and then there's the countless related diseases."

Five hours with Kim and I challenge anyone to come away with a positive attitude to smoking. She's right and we're the mugs.

After the last cigarette, we sit alone and contemplate our lives without the weed, before we all ritualistically throw our cigarette packets into Kim's basket. The session ends with a little hypnotherapy where we all pledge to ourselves that our smoking days are behind us.

I must admit that managing without cigarettes over the next few days was really quite easy. No Homer-like antics this time. I can do this, no problem, I thought. And according to Kim a few days without nicotine and we're free of the little monster, at least physiologically.

But a couple of weeks later, with a few drinks, came the craving. I thought, if giving up is this easy I could do it again. I forgot Kim's mantra. "There's no such thing as one cigarette."

As for me, I'm nipping out the back it is deadline day after all ...

Information: www.easywaybucks.co.uk