"Some of them I really enjoy"

Ask a smoker which cigarettes they'd miss and you rarely hear "all of them". You hear about four or five. The first of the day with a coffee. The one after a big meal. The one when you finally get out of the airport. The one at the end of a long shift, or after the cinema, or after sex. These are the ones people describe with real warmth, and they're the ones that make stopping feel like a sacrifice.

They have something in common. Every one of them comes after an unusually long gap.

The first of the day follows seven or eight hours without. Nicotine levels in a regular smoker build through the day and stay raised into the night, but by morning they're the lowest they'll be. The cigarette after a meal follows an hour at the table. The one outside arrivals follows a flight. The one after the film follows two hours in the dark. If the pleasure of a cigarette came from the cigarette, the timing wouldn't matter. But the ones you love are the ones you've waited longest for, and that's what you'd expect if the pleasure is mostly relief.

The opposite case points the same way. Think of a night out where you smoke one after another. By the fifth in two hours you're barely tasting them. You light the next one out of habit, smoke half, and wonder why you bothered. The tobacco is the same and so is the brand. There's no need left to relieve, so there's nothing much to enjoy. If it were the taste you wanted, the fifth would be as good as the first. With things that are pleasant in themselves, a second helping is usually still pleasant.

There's also your first ever cigarette. Hardly anybody enjoyed it. You coughed, you felt dizzy and a bit sick, and you carried on because of who you were with. If cigarettes tasted good you'd have liked that one. You learned to like them later, once there was a need for them to relieve.

I want to be careful here, because I said I wouldn't call your pleasure fake, and I won't. Relief is a real pleasure. Getting into a warm house on a freezing night is a real pleasure. When you say the after-dinner cigarette is lovely, you're reporting something true.

What I'd question is whether it's a pleasure worth arranging. The enjoyment of those four or five cigarettes is paid for by the discomfort that comes before them. The longer and more uncomfortable the wait, the better the cigarette. You get it in exchange for stretches of the day being slightly worse than they'd otherwise be. And the other ten or fifteen cigarettes, the top-ups you hardly notice, don't even deliver that. They're maintenance.

The ritual is a fair objection to all this. There's the coffee, the doorstep, the quiet street. That's true, and the ritual is carrying more of the pleasure than the cigarette gets credit for. A first coffee on the doorstep in the early light is a good thing with or without smoke in it. Smokers tend not to believe this, because they've never had one without the other since they were seventeen. The NHS lists an improved sense of taste and smell among the first changes people notice, within days or weeks.

If you smoke this week, run one more small check. Pick one of your favourites, and one of the forgettable ones from the middle of the afternoon. Pay full attention to both, from the first drag to the last. Notice the taste, how long the good part lasts, and how you feel as you stub it out. I won't tell you what you'll find. But I'd be surprised if the good part of even the best one lasts past the third or fourth drag.