Addictions

Just before you wag your finger in the air and declare that these addicts are deplorable I should like you to ponder something.

Everyone is addicted to something.

You don’t agree?

You may be addicted to going to the cinema, to ‘Jacob’s Cream Crackers’ with Camembert cheese, to pottering about in the garden…

There is something we all do that gives us peace of mind or some form of comfort just as a child will cling to a favourite blanket.

You may not see that as an addiction. Others will.

The problem with all addictions is that we do not recognise that we have them. The general view of this is that we can stop any time we want.

Mark Twain said that he finds it easy to stop smoking because he had done it hundreds of times.

So it is with smoking, drinking and drugs now. Not to mention gambling, sex and other addictions.

By drugs I do not mean, necessarily, proscribed drugs like heroin or cocaine, but also pharmaceutical drugs.

How many of us take these drugs knowing that there is an alternative but we cannot break free of them because ‘The Doctor told me to take it’ or because we fear the consequences to ourselves if we stop.

The truth is that you do not control your addiction – your addiction controls you. This is regardless of what it is that you are addicted to taking or doing.

I was an alcoholic. The truth is that I am still an alcoholic who does not drink alcohol any more.

Forty-eight years ago I came to realise, through friends who were rapidly turning their backs on me in disgust, that I was useless. My life was in ruins, my family was feeling the brunt of my ways and my professional life was going down the pan in no uncertain manner.

I stopped drinking.

True, I had considerable support. Some support from unlikely sources but support nonetheless.

I was told that if I needed one pint of beer every week then I was an alcoholic. The word here is ‘need’. You cannot let one week slip past without that one drink.

My problem was not one drink a week but a daily succession of drinks that turned me into a slobbering idiot. Occasionally a violent, slobbering idiot.

So I smoked. Heavily.

Everyone is addicted to something. Remember?

By 1997 I was breathing three packs of twenty cigarettes a day.

Have you heard the expression about being with a smoker that it is like kissing an old ashtray?

My son, who was four, asked me to stop smoking because he did not want me to die.

Then I calculated that the cost of smoking three packs a day in the United Kingdom came to more than my Military pension per month.

I stopped smoking.

I have just finished binge-watching ‘Lucifer’ on ‘Netflix’. With considerable feelings of guilt because I should be writing the fourth novel in the ‘Adepts’ series but, hey, watching TV is what addicts do, isn’t it?

And going to the cinema, eating ‘Jacob’s Cream Crackers’ with Camembert cheese, pottering about in the garden…