Once more with ill-tempered feeling, it's Christmas cold turkey

Sunday Tribune 28 December

I'll happily bet that Sir Walter bloody Raleigh never wore nicotine patches. Or made New Year's resolutions. I'll bet he never once sloped off to the fire escape on a busy workday morning for a furtive fag, or smelt like a perambulating ashtray.
He didn't have yellow fingers, bleeding gums or a larynx-loosening cough. I'll wager the swine never even knew how to spell 'Marlboro' when he sailed away from the New World with a hold full of weeds.
So why didn't he stick to inventing the potato or whatever else he did with his weekends? Why did he have to make this time of year such an unbearable pain in the bottom for millions of people?
Next Thursday, hordes of us smokers will wake up and resolve (after a bit of sputum hocking) never to smoke again.
It'll be like this great global cacophony; a bazillion throaty fanfares greeting the arrival of a fresh new day.
Then half of us will go "oh, jaysus" and reach for the ciggies.
I won't be one of them however. I normally last six days.
No, on Thursday I will be relatively clean smelling (relative to a dead skunk at any rate) and partially lung-clear. I will also be fidgety, cranky, depressed, aggressive, jittery, boorish and decidedly unhappy.
Normally I am only three of these things at any one time, so you can imagine my predicament. I will not so much be climbing the walls as doing my best impression of Spiderman on Speed.
The world, as you are no doubt aware, is divided into two camps; those who are addicted to nicotine and those who suffer from nicotine addiction.
I am in the former camp; my family and most of my friends are in the latter. Every January they have to suffer my mood swings as I try to keep myself from falling apart with patches and gum. My popularity – never the most remarkable of my personal attributes – will suffer greatly.
I will also be driven mad by people giving me advice. Non-smokers will tell me to stick with it, that every ciggie takes two minutes off my life. Smokers will, almost inevitably, then contradict this by saying that their granny smoked 500 Woodbines a day, drank a gallon of methylated spirits out of a galvanised bucket and still lived to the age of 104.
Who do you believe? I've done the sums and, if one ciggie equals two minutes, then I've already lost eight months off my life, which isn't too bad if I'm destined to live to 104, but not so great if God has short-term plans for me. So why am I going to bother again this year?
My dad was a smoker. He gave up in his 40s and lived to the age of 72. Cigarettes didn't kill him, but they certainly gave him emphysema which dramatically affected his quality of life.
The sound of dad gulping draughts of air, like a drowning man, clings to the memory like the graveyard mud that clung to my shoes this Christmas.
There were other sights and sounds too, when he was alive. The hum of the nebuliser pumping oxygen to his lungs never got so commonplace that it wouldn't distract you from the Christmas TV.
Then there was the panic in his eyes when the asthma and emphysema would conspire to launch a surprise attack on his weak lungs.
Dad was a gifted journalist, and even in the darkest moments of his decade-long death occasional bursts of tar-black humour would bubble to the surface.
When we were children he would strum the air and (kind of) sing "I brought my catarrh to a parteeeeee, but nobody asked me to play..." This was always rounded off with a disgusting, throaty "kkkkkwwwwwiiiikkkkkkkkk" sound that we kiddies thought was a hoot.
If he was here this Christmas he would be furiously encouraging me to stay off the ciggies, with patches, gum or whatever. And I would probably attempt some lame joke about cold turkey.
To which he would roll his eyes up to heaven and say:
"On your bike, Raleigh."

(Happy New Year)