THIS is my break-up letter to nicotine. I’ve loved nicotine now for most of my life. But nicotine’s got to go.

I’m quitting cigarettes. And I’ve bought a load of egg boxes to sound-proof my work-room at home so no-one needs to hear me scream and cry for a quick death. For the sake of my family I think I’ll go into self-isolation, and live out my shameful cold turkey away from the eyes of others.

Right now, I’ve just smoked my last cigarette – the beautiful little monster. As I write this, it’s No Smoking Day – March 11, 2020. My personal Ash Wednesday.

I’ve been shilly-shallying about quitting for months. I was going to stop before Christmas, but why spoil Christmas? I was going to stop as a New Year’s resolution – but New Year’s resolutions are stupid and cursed. Then I was sure I’d stop in February on my 50th birthday, as I got the shivers about my own mortality. It didn’t happen, though.

But No Smoking Day became a mental line in the sand for me. It was now or never. I want to stay alive to see if I have grandchildren, and I still haven’t got around to watching the Mad Men boxset. Although that might be a bad idea as everyone smokes on that show.

I’m genuinely scared of giving up – which sounds pathetic, and is pathetic, as I’m the one who chose to smoke. It’s a hard affair to break off.

Cigarettes have been with me since before I was born. My mum – like many mums in the sixties and seventies – only stopped smoking when she was pregnant with me because of morning sickness. She started smoking again after I was born. My generation imbibed tar with milk.

I think no more badly of my parents’ generation and their attitude to cigarettes than I do of parents today who stick iPads under their children’s noses to shut them up. At least my parents talked to me as they smoked and damaged me.

I recall my childhood across a veil of cigarette smoke. I remember watching Morecambe and Wise, and Coronation Street, and Moonlighting, and I Claudius through a fug of tobacco. Everyone smoked, everywhere, all the time. My headmaster at primary school smoked in his office; school staff rooms were cigarette dens. People smoked in hospitals, on planes.

Of course, warnings began appearing on cigarette packets in the early 1970s, but no-one really cared that much. My grandmother would tell me I’d stunt my growth if I smoked, while she lit another Embassy Red. It was more the rising cost of cigarettes which troubled folk.

Smoking was also dangerously, stupidly, cool. It’s hard to imagine how cool cigarettes were back then. Now, cigarettes are like the mark of Cain – smoking singles you out as mucky and common and thick. Back when I was a kid, though, smoking made you a rebel and interesting – you could be your own little Jack Kerouac if you had a fag in one hand and a book in the other.

So I vividly remember “teaching” myself to smoke. I was 14. I bought a packet of Players – as quite literally anyone could buy cigarettes then – and a bottle of raspberryade. My parents were out. I sat in front of the TV, watching Blue Peter, and “taught” myself how to inhale. Every time I choked, I reached for the raspberryade.

What a bloody wee idiot. I wish I could go back in time and kick myself straight in the a**e. Nearly all my friends and girlfriends smoked. As we got older and started partying, cigarettes were as much a part of teen social rituals as music, cider and snogging.

Cigarettes became embedded in my life – they got me through exams, followed me to nightclubs, and on holiday. I was in a steady relationship with nicotine now. By the time I left university in the early 1990s, however, something had changed. Cigarettes were losing their glamour. They were starting to be just plain scary.

My grandmother smoked from her teens into her eighties. She lived to 93. But when she died, not long after I graduated, doctors said she might easily have hit 100 or even lived longer if she’d only stopped smoking much earlier. In the end, it was smoking which killed her.

I quit cigarettes then. It was hard but I thought of my gran and within weeks I wasn’t suffering those ghastly, crippling cravings anymore. I was clean for years – until I moved from my home in Northern Ireland to Scotland.

When I arrived here in the mid-90s, I had to make new friends. I knew nobody in Scotland, so I was always out at pubs or clubs getting to know folk, building up a new network of pals. At that time, a lot of people my age were still smoking (our brains remaining partially addled with the belief that cigarettes were cool) – and I started back on the tabs. Everyone was doing it, so why shouldn’t I?

This time, I bet my gran wanted to cross over from the afterlife to kick me up the a**e.

That was 20-odd years ago. Since my children were born I’ve hated my stupid addiction. I hated that I felt a bad role model, I hated that I might shorten my time with them.

The smoking ban, and pictures of hideous diseases on tobacco packaging, have long burned away my dumb notions of glamour. If you smoke now you’re a pariah.

Smoking is just a long game of Russian Roulette. My mum finally stopped  in her seventies – when she was diagnosed with a severe respiratory disease.

I feel really quite stupid, and quite angry at myself, for allowing this terrible lover nicotine to take such dangerous control of my life over so many long years.

I want to protect myself physically now – not necessarily just for me, but for those I love.

I’m going to do it. And this all makes me think, that if I can kick one bad lover out of my life, then I can kick another out too. If I beat cigarettes, social media goes next. Why protect my body, if I’m not prepared to protect my mind, my soul?

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year