Out of puff

The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades.

The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades. ‘This diary is going to be about my attempt to give up smoking,’ he writes on page 1:

It is also going to be my main help in giving up smoking. By the time I’ve finished it I will be a free man, able to leave the house without my two packets of cigarettes, and my two lighters, able to sit down and read without compulsively checking that I’ve got these four articles in place on the desk in front of me or on the little table beside me .