Morning:
13°c
I'm writing this in a museum - a museum of smoking.
Behind me on the mantelpiece are ranged three racks holding 30-odd tobacco pipes - some, like the Turk's head meerschaum given me by Ralph Steadman, very odd.
On top of a tall chest of drawers is a large humidor containing at least six different kinds of cigars, ranging from Montecristo Petit Edmundos, to Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No 2s.
At least my dad's old Chinese tobacco jar, which is on my desk, still sees some service.
In it I keep the dark hand-rolling mixture that the increasingly lugubrious Jeremy Cole of Smith's in Charing Cross Road makes up for me. I smoke three of these roll-ups a day - a mere flirtation with La Divina Nicotina compared with the passionate daylong embrace we used to enjoy before the smoking ban came in last summer.
Yes, for me the ban has worked, not that I ever doubted that it would. I knew I wouldn't be able to cope with grabbing a feverish toke as I tripped from kerbside to restaurant, café, club or bar-room door. Emphatically not for me is the exiguous, wraithlike fraternity of the exiled smokers who, left out in the cold, look more and more unhealthy by the minute, casting furtive glances up and down the street, as if expecting the cops to swoop down on them and rip up their NHS cards.
While unbridled in most intoxicants, for me tobacco has always been a meditative pleasure: a gestalt of light, smoke, aroma, food and drink.
As soon as I knew this would no longer be available I made plans. I'd discovered some stuff called snus, small pouches of fire-cured tobacco you can place under your lip. They're less medicinal than gum or patches and they satisfy the craving.
They're also not particularly carcinogenic, although the EU, in its wisdom, still won't allow them to be sold here. In Sweden, where 30 per cent of the male population are regular users, they have the lowest cancer rates in Europe.
So, snus takes care of the addiction, while the three roll-ups a day are what remains of the pleasure.
In the past I've been dismissive of nicotine substitution as a route to total abstinence but, as the weeks of cutting down stretch into months, I can see the preposterousness of going back. Last winter was dominated by chronic bronchitis; touch defunct pipe, this one hasn't been. Putting mini tea bags under my lip for the remainder of my allotted time seems equally preposterous.
Of course, there are some diehard smokers who can still lure me out on to the paving. The other night, in biting wind and rain, I smoked a roll-up with a prominent controversialist outside the back door of the Ivy. We smoked and talked of dystopian novels that portray future societies as distorted mirrors of our own; the trouble is that for old puffers, post-ban London still seems like a dystopian novel - albeit one without a plot.
