"It's how I know people"

Smoking areas are friendly places. Stand outside any office, wedding or pub and you'll find people talking who'd never have spoken inside. The junior from accounts and the director share a lighter. Strangers at a wedding compare notes on the speeches. There's a loose membership to it, and an understanding that anyone who comes out is welcome to join in.

If you've smoked for years, some of your friendships started this way, and some of your best conversations happened there. It's natural to fear that stopping means handing in your membership. You picture yourself inside at the table, minding the coats, while the interesting people are out in the garden.

The conversations were good, and I'm not going to argue otherwise. What I'd ask is which part of the arrangement made them good. You were outside, away from the music, in a small group, with a natural time limit and nothing to prove. Everyone had stepped out of their role for five minutes. Those are close to ideal conditions for talking to someone. The cigarette gathered the group, but it isn't what made the talk good.

Nobody checks at the door of a smoking area either. You can go out with your friends when they go, holding your drink, and stay for the conversation. Most smokers don't mind in the least. You may find after a while that the smell puts you off, and drift towards going out less. But that's a choice you get to make later. It isn't a sentence passed on the day you stop.

I should be straight about a risk, though. Being around other smokers, with cigarettes to hand, is the classic setting for a slip. Saul Shiffman and colleagues had people who'd recently stopped carry small computers and record what was going on whenever they were tempted and whenever they lapsed. Lapses were more likely where smoking was allowed, where cigarettes were easy to get, and where other smokers were present. Low mood featured too. Add a few drinks, which make every plan feel less important, and you have the usual scene of a first lapse, in a pub garden at about ten o'clock on a Friday.

So for the first few weeks it makes sense to treat that setting with some respect. That doesn't have to mean staying away from your friends. You could leave the garden when the third round arrives, drink a bit less than usual, or tell the people you're with that you've stopped so nobody offers. The NHS suggests having a sentence ready, and "No thanks, I don't smoke" is hard to beat. Chapter 12 turns this into a plan.

There's a deeper version of this worry, which is about who you are. After fifteen or twenty years, "smoker" can feel less like a habit and more like a trait, part of a package with being sociable, a bit rebellious, not precious about things. People who stop sometimes feel they're going over to the other side, to join the ones who tut and wave their hands.

Think about when that identity was chosen. For a lot of people it was somewhere in their teens, outside a school gate or at a party, for reasons that made sense at fifteen. You wanted to look older, or to belong to a particular group, or just not to refuse. You wouldn't let a fifteen-year-old pick your job or your partner, but they picked this, and you've been keeping it going ever since.

Stopping doesn't change your sense of humour or your politics, and it won't turn you into someone who tuts. The people worth knowing in the smoking area liked you for reasons that had nothing to do with what was in your hand. You get to keep all of it. What changes is that once an hour you're no longer steered by something you didn't choose.