A Horseradish
Saturday 8th November 2014 10:28pm [Edited]
8,475 posts
I have not been at all sure whether to comment either on this thread or privately. However, I have decided that I should say something and also to go public with it for reasons of directness. It could even be an education. First and foremost, I'm very sorry to hear about your wife and am sure from what I know of you that she will be in good care. Secondly, I am wondering if my comments on the D-I-Y thread may have inadvertently led to some questions and would like to be clear on any doubts that may have been raised.
In mid October, I decided to strip the wallpaper from the walls of one room. That was purely my decision and nobody else's although my father leant me a scraper for the purpose. I had managed to get through over 50 years without ever undertaking that activity. He saw it as a positive sign but from a real position it was bound to be disastrous. I am totally hopeless at everything of a practical nature. When in the past I tried to paint a flat, most of the paint ended up on the windows and the doors. I have the coordination of an orangutan. That is something which pains me given my precision in desk work. And in my current home, I wasn't anticipating meeting polystyrene last month and then having it showering over me from the walls.
The severe cough that I developed within 24 hours might have been a reminder of why I was embarking on the project in the first place. Yes, I am - or have been - a cigarette smoker and for aesthetic and financial reasons I was preparing to cease. I have only ever smoked in one room in the house and redecorating that room seemed to be a good start in the process. It would effectively have to make my home a non-smoking place. Perhaps that, though, in itself made the project seem more daunting. It seemed like a huge step.
Ironically I never have had a smokers' cough but I have always had a severe allergy to dust. This can lead to excessive sneezing and it affects the skin on the rare occasions that there is a dust disturbance. If anything, smoking has always alleviated it. But I had for some weeks experienced problems with skin and an idiot in a chemist speculated that it could have been caused by bugs. The very suggestion horrified me, it didn't ring true with my generally clean lifestyle and it has now been totally dismissed by proper medics.
However, nine days after the polystyrene incident, it meant that I did go round the carpets of the house obsessively for hours on end mainly on my knees and with dustpan and brush. This threw up dust into the atmosphere and triggered significant wheezing. I also threw my bed out which, with hindsight, didn't need to be done. And at the same time I cut the smoking down by more than half which is something that is known to have its own processes including temporary respiration problems. To then be sleeping on the floor and/or settees in a newly created dust cloud virtually finished me off. Antibiotics didn't work and I was back at the GP on Friday. This has been day one of a course of oral steroids, an inhaler, antihistamine tablets, topical steroids for the skin and an emollient. The GPs have obviously made a massive thing of the smoking during this period. They have seized the opportunity to get me to give up. This I will be doing in the coming days.
It is, I think, worth saying that people have always taken up smoking for various reasons. It is not the simplistic business many pretend. In my case, I am of the opinion that had I not done so - and drunk beer heavily - I would never have gone to university, socialised, had relationships, or ever held down work for more than a few months. Like most people one meets in life, I am a strange combination. Arguably there is an unusual amount of balance in me but many would accept that it is a balance of considerable extremes. I am naturally open and, socially, often unexpectedly lightweight. Some actually see me as very relaxed and most have felt that I am an above average verbal communicator. In parallel, I have always had an acute strand of anxiety, particularly in regard to serious matters which often portrays me as the very opposite, and I always needed coping strategies to ensure that the first could just about win in spite of the second.
Consequently, I briefed Government Ministers and others face-to-face for years when I would probably have otherwise been on benefits by the age of 24. I was also able to be someone who didn't merely socialise rather than stay at home but socialised as if there was no tomorrow, pushing myself into a lot of great places where I wanted to be when the more doubtful instinct was telling me to do the complete reverse. I pretty much gave up beer overnight at 42 and have stuck with it for nearly a decade. This was considered almost impossible by those who knew me but it proved easy. It's now about three pints per month maximum. Giving up cigarettes is a more difficult matter to address but I think it will happen as long as professional people don't whip up huge amounts of fear in my direction as that is guaranteed to be counter-productive.
I can't say that I ever found the dialogue around Roy Castle or indeed the smoking ban at all helpful. The former turned smokers into the people it was cool to attack when many of the other options for those who are natural attackers were removed from them. While the science on passive smoking is far from proven, it is no coincidence that smoker bashing arrived when bashing any other minority rightly became unacceptable. And by making every non-smoker potentially antagonistic, it was particularly harsh on people like me who had needed smoking as a device to socialise. There was certainly an element of social withdrawal and added stress, both of which may or may not ultimately have contributed to my early departure from the workplace. What is without question is that the psychology around smoking in all is too readily dismissed. Currently, in what is a fairly straightforward transition in me on paper, it is impossible to say how much of what's happening is physical and how much represents a deeper upheaval. I suspect the latter may be significant.
Finally, there is one other reason why I took to smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. Both activities were - and remain - lawful. To the self-professed experts who proclaim that the illegal status of other substances makes no difference to their usage, I can say bollocks from a purely personal point of view. It might well be true of the influential movers and shakers and of those some people call the chavs but it wasn't true of me. It was precisely how and why I could attend more festivals and gigs than some have hot dinners and enjoy them without other drugs. There is just one thing people need to know about the post Castle strategy on cigarette smoking. It is that every single bit of it from the over-accentuating of passive smoking through the pub, workplace and football ground bans and the soon-to-be banning in public parks has been designed with the purpose of decriminalising dope. It is effectively setting the barriers for a future legal cannabis usage which will be wholly in line with the laws for cigarettes. And whatever the rights or wrongs of that matter, it is sneaky, duplicitous and unfair in the way past and present law abiders are having to adjust to past and present law breakers. That advocates refuse to see it or accept it is a fascinating - if trite - cultural lacuna.
I just knew someone would raise this, which is not the issue, and as it happens I packed up three years ago with my wife when she did after she had a stroke.
