Damned Weed
I suppose you could say I was a late starter.

My little pink lungs were smoke vigins until I smoked my first joint when I was 17. I can't say I remember much of the experience as the Red Lebanese resin turned my young mind to mush for an hour or so.

For the first few weeks of my introduction to smoking spliffs, I just smoked spliffs ... nothing else. 3 or 4 spliffs over a weekend.

But then, as I suppose is the same for many, the nicotene monkey was on my back and I started buying and smoking regular cigarettes to tide me over during the week until I would have my weekend spliffs.

It started with a pack of 10 bensons on a monday morning, which would last at one or two a day until the weekend.

Then of course, that rapidly grew until within 6 months of my first spliff I was a regular 20 a day joe!.

I gave up smoking marijuana by the time I was in my early 20's, but the nicotene monkey was well and truely entrenched on my back and as a souvenier of my heady pot smoking teens, I had a 20-30 a day cigarette habit.

I thought nothing of it to be honest. I met and married my Wife, she did not smoke, so I restricted my habit to the basement.

Once we found that my Wife had fallen pregnant, I moved my smoking habit into the garden where it stayed for a few years.

Then came the fateful day!.

I was bathing my Daughter (now 4 years old) and she was playing with some foam letters that stick to the side of the bath. She picked up the letter "I" and put it in her mouth and said " look Daddy, I have a cigarette just like you".

I took her out of the bath, dried her off and sent her down to Mum, then threw my cigarettes in the bin, followed by lighters, ashtrays etc and had a little wobbly teary eyed moment.

I have not smoked since ... no patches, no gum no nothing ... just the memory of my dear little girl sat in the bath pretending to smoke "just like Daddy" is enough to keep me stopped!.

Almost a year since I quit, best thing I ever did.

I totalled up how much money I had spent over almost 25 years of smoking.

FUCK!
( RadG Drinking Mojitos in the sun, Tue 25 Mar 2008, 14:21, Reply)