Diary – 10 April 2004

I gave up smoking 11 months ago. It had reached the point where I had come to regard eating as an inconvenient interruption to smoking. People keep asking me if I feel any better but I don’t really. I have a permanent cold, excessive catarrh, I experienced hay fever last summer for the first time, and I have insomnia in the early hours. I’m told by ex-smokers that this can last for two years as the body adjusts. I was smoking too much: 60 Silk Cut Extra Mild a day and, thanks to successive chancellors, was spending about £5,000 a year on the habit. I began buying nicotine replacement patches at £17 for a week’s supply and then discovered they could be bought on prescription at just over £6 for a month’s worth. The government’s drive to curtail smoking costs £50 million a year and has been criticised by a Treasury committee as being too much for a low success rate. Well, the patches worked for me. The key, I suspect, is to wear the full-strength ones for three months, progress to medium-strength and then low-strength, six months in all. I’m surprised at the extravagant praise I receive from those involved with the NHS. When I told my doctor I had not smoked for this period he smiled ecstatically, clapped his hands and exclaimed, ‘Wonderful, fantastic, well done!’ The pretty Welsh chemist was just as overwhelmed. ‘That’s wonderful!’ she gushed, her eyes gleaming with almost religious excitement. ‘Marvellous!’

A consequence of this insomnia is that I now read books at four or five in the morning. I’ve just finished Nicholas Farrell’s excellent Mussolini: a New Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Some critics thought he was too kind about the dictator, but I don’t think so. Mussolini was clearly not the buffoon I had thought.