"I'd just go back to smoking"

This is the fear underneath the last chapter, and it deserves to be met on its own.

There's a difference between a vape you use and a vape you carry. The one you use is the loop. The one you carry is insurance, and insurance doesn't have to be in your mouth to work. If the fear is that a gap will end in a cigarette, then keep the vape, in a drawer at home and a bag at work, charged, with liquid in it, and never let it run out. Its job is to be there. On the day a gap produces a real pull towards a cigarette, you go to the drawer, and the vape is there, and you have a draw, and the cigarette doesn't happen. That's insurance working. It's not the same as having it in your hand between every sentence.

Most ex-smokers, I think, will find that the insurance is claimed far less often than they expect. The wish for a cigarette specifically, as opposed to a wish for nicotine, is mostly a wish that belongs to particular cues, the pint, the row, the car park at work, and those get weaker with each time they're met without one. The NHS says the same about tobacco cravings, that they pass. The vape in the drawer means you never have to test that with nothing behind you.

For the day you do stop, if you get there, the NHS suggests switching to a fast-acting nicotine product, a mouth spray is the one it names, with a patch for the background, and asking a pharmacist or an adviser about it. That's a wall against cigarettes that isn't a vape and doesn't live in a pocket. It's in chapter 18. I mention it here so that you know there's a plan for that day that doesn't involve standing in the wind with nothing.

And if you do have a cigarette, one day, after all this. Then you have a cigarette, and you go back to the vape the same day, and you haven't lost the switch. The NHS line is that going back to a vape is much better than starting to smoke again, and I'd add that one cigarette isn't starting to smoke again. It's one cigarette. Chapter 21 is about that.