"I've cut down loads since cigarettes"

If you switched from smoking, you'll feel that you've already done the hard part. Twenty a day and now this. The vape is the reduced version. It's the cutting down already done.

I'd like to put that next to something from chapter 1. Twenty a day was a number. You knew it. You bought them in twenties and could see the packet. The vape has no number, and the reason it has no number is the thing in chapter 3. Without an ending there's nothing to count. So the claim that you've cut down is a comparison between a known figure and an unknown one, and it can't be checked. It might be true. It might be that you're taking in the same nicotine as before, spread across the whole day instead of in twenty lumps. You don't know, and I don't, and neither of us can until you've counted.

The NHS advice for people switching from cigarettes is to use the vape as much as they need to, and not to worry if they're vaping more than they used to smoke. That's good advice and I'd repeat it. When the choice is between a vape and a cigarette, the vape should win every time and however often. But that advice is for the switch, and the switch was a while ago. It was written for the weeks when the alternative was a cigarette. It's been read, by a lot of people, as a permanent licence, and it wasn't meant as one. The same NHS page says that if you're vaping to stop smoking you should aim to stop vaping too, eventually, and eventually has a way of not arriving when nothing's counted.

I'd say the truth is this. You did the hard part. You stopped smoking, and that was the change that mattered, and nothing that follows takes it away from you. What you didn't do, because nobody told you it needed doing, is put a shape back on the habit once the smoke was gone. So the cutting down that felt complete was in fact a switch from a counted habit to an uncounted one, and an uncounted habit has only one direction to go.

The way to find out where it's got to is the tally. If you've done it, look at the number. If it's under twenty draws, you've genuinely cut down and this book will be short work. If it's over a hundred, you've spread twenty cigarettes' worth of nicotine so thin that it looks like nothing, and the not knowing was the habit all along.