The back door at ten past eleven

Here's an example. It's ten past eleven on a Tuesday, and you've just come off the phone with a client who was rude, and wrong, and who you had to be polite to for fourteen minutes. Your jaw is tight. You pick up your coat, because the lighter's in the pocket, and you go down the stairs and out of the back door by the bins.

You light up. On the first proper drag your shoulders come down. By the third you're thinking about the call more calmly, and by the end of the cigarette you've decided what to say in the follow-up email. You go back upstairs feeling like yourself again.

If somebody told you at that moment that the cigarette had done nothing, you'd think they'd never smoked. You felt it work. It took about ten seconds.

I'm not going to tell you that you imagined it. The relief at the back door is a real physical event, and any honest book about smoking has to start by admitting that. What I want to ask is what it was relief from.

You'd say the phone call. I think that's part of the answer, and the smaller part. Your last cigarette was at about half past nine, on the way in. By ten past eleven you'd gone an hour and forty minutes without nicotine, and for a regular smoker that's long enough to feel it. You wouldn't have called it a craving. It shows up as a slight restlessness and a shorter fuse, and a sense that something isn't quite settled. Then the client rang.

So at the back door you were carrying two things. One was the call. The other was a low, nagging need that had been building since half past nine and had nothing to do with the client at all. The cigarette removed the second one, quickly and completely. It did nothing about the first. The client was still rude and still wrong, and you still had the email to write. But with the need gone you felt so much better that the whole improvement got credited to the cigarette, and to its power over stress.

I'll use three plain terms in this book. The need is that background restlessness that builds as nicotine leaves your body. The relief is what you feel when a cigarette ends it. And a top-up is what most cigarettes are, which is a dose that arrives before the need has got loud enough for you to notice it.

Top-ups matter, because they explain why the need is so hard to see. If you smoke fifteen or twenty a day, you rarely let it build. You feel roughly all right most of the time, and you put that down to being a person who feels roughly all right. You only meet the need properly on a long flight, or in a meeting that overruns, or when you've run out at midnight. Then it's obvious, and unpleasant, and you think of it as what life without cigarettes would be like. It isn't, and chapter 10 explains why. It's what the gap between two cigarettes is like.

A colleague who has never smoked took a call just as bad at the desk next to yours. They were annoyed too. They made a tea, complained to someone for a minute, and wrote their email. They didn't need to go and stand by the bins to get back to normal, because for them normal wasn't draining away in the background all morning.

That's the argument of the book in one scene. The remaining chapters test it against the things cigarettes seem to do, one at a time, and some of those tests are harder for me than this one.

You can start checking it yourself. If you smoke over the next few days, take ten seconds before you light one and ask how you feel. I don't mean how your day is going. I mean in your body, at that moment. Then ask again halfway down the cigarette. You're not trying to change anything. You're looking for the need before the cigarette removes the evidence.