The hand in the pocket

It's ten past nine and you've been at your desk for forty minutes. You've answered some emails and opened the thing you're meant to be doing. Your hand goes to your pocket, comes out with the vape, and you have a draw while you read the first line. You put it down on the desk, next to the keyboard. Twenty minutes later you have another. You don't remember having it. You remember the email.

At eleven you go to the bathroom, and in the cubicle you have three or four draws, because it's the one place nobody's looking. At the lights on the way home you have one. The car smells faintly of mango. On the sofa the vape is on the arm, and it goes to your mouth during the adverts and sometimes during the programme. In bed it's on the bedside table, and the last thing before the lamp goes off is a draw, and if you wake at three there's another, and the first thing in the morning is the hand going out before your eyes are open.

This is an invented day, but I'd be surprised if you didn't recognise most of it. Somewhere in that day is the thing this book is about. If someone asked how many cigarettes you used to smoke, you'd have said twenty, or fifteen, or thirty on a bad day. If someone asks how many draws you had today, you have no idea. Not roughly. No idea. And you'd say the vape helps you. It takes the edge off. Your hand and your mouth want it and when they get it you feel a small settling, dozens of times a day, and you couldn't say what it's settling.

Some words. I'll call the hand going to the pocket without a decision the reach. I'll call the fact that the vape is always on you the pocket, whether it's a pocket or a bag or the arm of the sofa. A cigarette had something I'll call the ending, which is that it burned down and was over, and a vape has no ending at all. The steady level of nicotine that the day's draws hold you at, I'll call the line. When the line drops, which it does in the gaps, I'll call that the fall, and what the next draw seems to give you I'll call the calm. The whole cycle, fall, reach, calm, I'll call the loop. And the day's number is the count of draws you have in a day, which right now you don't know.

That's the first thing to do, and I'd do it before you read further. Tomorrow, count. Keep a tally on your phone, or a bit of paper, one mark for every draw. If you can, make a second mark for each draw you actually decided to have, meaning you noticed you wanted it before your hand moved. Don't change anything. Just count. A study of young adult vapers in America found that four in five of them vaped within thirty minutes of waking, which is one of the standard signs of dependence on nicotine. I'd expect your first mark to be earlier than that. Most people who count are shocked by the first column and find the second column nearly empty, and that gap is what the rest of the book is about.