If you're trying to quit smoking at the moment, spare a kind thought for Ruth Burke-Kennedy.
Everyone knows that quitting smoking is about as easy as hauling weights through a pool of treacle with your teeth. Even non-smokers know this. It's one of those things everyone knows, such as that when cows lie down it's about to rain. But, belonging to the idiotic variety of human being, I figured that it really is only as hard as you make it. I mean, I've watched a full-length opera. Live. If I can do that, I can do anything.
Now, as it transpires, I have done everything, and I am still failing. I have tried the gum, with its cement-like, jaw-breaking consistency, but decided, for the good of my teeth, that I should quit it. I have tried giving up the things I associate with smoking, such as alcohol and fun, but another thing everyone knows is that alcohol and fun affect your judgment and make you believe that smoking not only is a
fine idea but also makes you look like Marlene Dietrich.
I have even tried herbal cigarettes - as in grass-clippings-and-flower-heads herbal, not marijuana herbal. They are nicotine-free, and smoking them is like standing near a bonfire that's won't light while trying to suck up the fumes through a straw. The experience angered me so much that my face contorted into a sneer that could be removed only with the help of a facial massage, several stiff drinks and a real cigarette.
But it's all right, because now I am supposed to be smoking. At least until I finish the page-turner that is Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Once you read this book, apparently, you're cured. (Of everything: Carr's formula is so successful that he has also written books on how to manage weight problems and alcohol dependence.) Intriguingly, one of the first tactics he advises is that you continue to smoke while you read.
Sitting on a train, having skimmed through chapter 4, I must admit I am still no closer to understanding how this is ever going to work or how anyone has managed to read this book-shaped infomercial from cover to cover without committing hara-kiri. It's intolerable. Carr keeps writing in capitals, so it's as if he is shouting. "YOU TOO CAN DO THIS," he booms.
And he appears to have trademarked a considerable amount of the English language. There are ™ symbols everywhere. Is he allowed to do this? From now on, whenever I say "easy way", do I have to pay Carr a fee?
He's beginning to drive me around the bend. He keeps talking about himself and his 60-a-day habit and how he couldn't climb the stairs and how, if he can quit, I can quit. But we're already off on the wrong foot. I don't smoke 60 a day. It's more like five. And I have no problem with the stairs; there's a lift. More importantly, he never seems to get to the point. He keeps telling me that quitting is possible, but he hasn't said how. I am holding out for a single cure-all mantra, and there is nothing in sight.
Perhaps, as I near the end of the book, somewhere in chapter 14 - God give me patience; how much more of this can I be expected to take? - I will discover, with a fag hanging out of my mouth in the style of Dot Cotton, the one-line epiphany, the life-changing, or at least lifestyle-changing, miracle sentence that will leave me cured of my nicotine addiction forever.
As if. Nothing to that effect in chapter 14 as far as I can see (without actually reading it). It seems that if I am to quit successfully, or at least have a serious go at it, I have to actually read this book. The. Whole. Thing. It takes a mere nanosecond for the horror of this to sink in.
I am suddenly reminded of a book review by Dorothy Parker in which she wrote: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
I am dismayed to discover that the train's windows don't open, and I am left only to imagine the cover crushed on to the tracks as pages flutter into the distance. And then fear grips me, albeit momentarily. If the windows don't open, what are we supposed to do in the event of an emergency? There are no encased red hammers to be seen. I calm myself with the realisation that, if the worst comes to the worst, I can try bashing through the glass with Carr's impenetrable paperback.
The only way this multimillion-euro-earning bestseller is likely to cure me of smoking is by boring me to death. It has given me some inspiration, however. I am planning to write a multimillion-euro- earning bestseller entitled The Easy Way™ to Read Allen Carr's Easy Way™ to Stop Smoking without Ending Up in the Wrong Kind of Institution™. And it will come with a free packet of cigarettes.
