This New Year, instead of quitting smoking, I'm giving up swimming. It's no great sacrifice. I've never shared a bucket with a school of octopus, but I have swum in public baths in the month of January, so I know what it's like.
Nine-tenths of the water runs out through the overflow pipe and the bath walls start to crumble as they strain to accommodate hundreds of freshly-signed-up "new me" types making their annual lifestyle refinements.
Poor souls. Their misguided belief that donning rubber caps and goggles and squeezing past other people through chlorinated, urinated waters will somehow enhance their quality of life is matched only by their conviction that they will still be doing this in three weeks' time. Hah!
Like most resolutions, mine won't last. I'll take up swimming again, sometime in early February, when the lanes become empty, the waters grow still and I can paddle from one end of the pool to the other without getting poked in the eye by somebody trying the butterfly stroke for the first time.
If that seems like a feeble resolution, at least it's more realistic than that lost-cause-to-beat-all-lost-causes: quitting smoking. Around the same time as the numbers attending swimming pools and gyms drop, the ashtrays of Ireland will start to fill up again, as hundreds of thousands of New Year's resolutions are stubbed out.
Giving up smoking is no longer an annual event; it has become a widespread habit in its own right. The prompts come one on top of another: besides New Year's Day, there is Ash Wednesday, the UK's National No-Smoking Day in March, and World Tobacco-Free Day on May 31st.
Then there's the trip to the doctor and the inevitable suggestion that we try product X, the new miracle cure for smokers. I'm a sucker for nicotine chewing gum, tablets, "inhalators" and drops. Spurred by these products and a weak respiratory system, I can put my hand on my (probably dodgy) heart and declare that I am no longer a smoker.
Instead, I'm a quitter who fails on a regular basis. I have tried nearly all the products mentioned above, but every one of my attempts to give up cigarettes has ultimately failed. In fact, every smoker I know seems to be in one state or another of quitting, relapse, smoking on the sly, or rolling 10 joints a day.
Quitting smoking is big business. Over two-thirds of smokers want to give up. Every year, one quarter of us give it a go but fewer than 3 per cent succeed. Most of those who eventually manage to give up cigarettes have failed three or four times before.
In Britain next year, smokers - or ex-smokers, or temporary non-smokers - are expected to spend £60 million on quit smoking products. In the past year, I have spent at least as much on quitting as I have on cigarettes. This time last year, a hypnotist convinced me I needed to hand over £120 for two sessions in the chair (I stayed off cigarettes for five months). Believing myself too weak to rely on hypnosis alone, I also applied nicotine patches to my skin, at the cost of about £15 a week. More recently, a laser therapist charged me £150 (two months and counting).
It always seems worthwhile financially. I mean, pretty soon, you'll have to take out a mortgage just to buy a box of fags. Mr McCreevy's recent price hike of 10p will bring the price of 20 cigarettes to £3.94 (or exactly €5) one of the highest prices you'll pay anywhere in the world. Smoking 20 a day for a month costs over £100, so a once-off payment on a quit-smoking regime seems insignificant by comparison. Except it's not a once-off payment. Smokers are inherently bad at giving up smoking. Genetic research has established that some people are more susceptible to addiction than others.
People with a certain gene are less likely to start smoking and, if they start, find it easier to quit. This gene has no name, just a very long number, so I call it "the jammy git gene".
Failure to quit is not just accepted; in today's society, it's expected.
According to the modern interpretation of smoking, we are not to blame for our habit. Smokers are the puppets of global corporations who have brainwashed us with advertising, hooked us with nicotine, and secured our addiction with chemical additives. Against these forces, how could we succeed? All in all, though, I'm very glad that the quit-smoking industry is as developed as it is. Who knows what my habit would be like otherwise.
Furthermore, I find that parting with large sums of cash is a great motivator. If you pay to check into the Betty Ford Clinic, you're going to have a damn good stab at giving up whatever it is you're trying to give up. What I'd pay for a jammy-git gene.
And when I consider the personalised "quitting" regimes that people concoct, I thank God there are more sensible methods available off the shelf. One man I know stopped smoking cigarettes only to start smoking marijuana instead. When he ran out of dope, he began rolling "joints" without marijuana, and dubbed them "fakies". Though he consumed more than 10 of these a day, he insisted he was still not a smoker. Che Guevara, revolutionary and asthma sufferer, deceived himself in a similar way. Advised by his doctor to cut down to one cigar a day, he asked his tobacconist to roll him a foot-long cigar, which took him most of the day to smoke.
Oh, addiction cessation - what a line of work to be in! It must be almost as good as running a swimming pool whose members only turn up for a few weeks at the start of the year.
