I smoked on and off from the age of 11 - a packet of ten Number 6, from the cigarette machine outside Archie's newsagent in Terriers (?) - Billy Colborn, a couple of others - I think it was me who was elected to jump over the fence behind the shooting range in the corner of the sports field, a gap in the laurel hedge - the barrier between the safe upper-middle class privilege of the Royal Grammar School and the grubby working class life beyond - to Easter Sunday, aged 41, when I gave up, and headed off to a new life in the Tuscan mountains.Fighting nicotine addiction was like fighting with an internal occupant of my body - a fight I won in the end. Now I feel like I still have some internal occupants - and don't know who controls whom. They are my feelings - and they seem to be so much wiser than me.
