Time Flies By When I'm the Driver of a Train

At least, it does if we imagine that the "train" to which I refer is actually smoking.

I was just contemplating various time-related stuff - things that had to be done by, or had to or will happen by a certain date - and realised that I am - as is the rest of the Western world, for that matter - still only in July. And only just the last week of July.

It is a bonus that time seems to have slowed now that I have quit smoking; time does, after all, fly away faster as I get older. At the same time, however, I wish time was going just a little bit faster. Not by much, perhaps just a few ticks every hour.

It is also a bonus that today, I have no wish to murder anybody, and smokers in the street shall remain unmugged. Nonetheless, the absence of the cigarette - from my hand, from my life - nags. Not smoking is a vacuum into which something wants to rush - and that something is, of course, nicotine. It wants to rush back in, a nicotine rush, to all those nicotine receptors I spent 20 years developing (it should be nearly thirty, really, but I've had a lot of quits)...

It does get easier, as they say, and as I anyway know. I also know I'm one fag away from a pack of day, and I don't want just one, I want them all. Yet sometimes, the idea of again having them all seems so sweet that I don't care about my heart and lungs, I don't care that, when I am smoking, I spend a great deal of the time worrying that I'm about to suffer a coronary or develop a cancer.

All I want is blue smoke trailing from my mouth and the junkie pleasure of having fulfilled my need.

However, at this moment:

One month, two days, 16 hours, 0 minutes and 22 seconds. 980 cigarettes not smoked, saving £269.50. Life saved: 3 days, 9 hours, 40 minutes.

Ooh, look! Some time tomorrow, I'll have not smoked a thousand. Now there's a milestone about which to hullabaloo!