Good morning and welcome to my live blog of my experiences trying to live blog my attempts to give up smoking.

[Goes and Googles picture of inhaler for later on]

The dec-[puts kettle on to boil]-ision to take up smoking was made by 17 year-old me back in the late eighties and, frankly, is just one of the many reasons that I resent 17 year-old me.[Makes coffee]

Back then 10 Benson & Hedges cost 69p [checks Twitter] and living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse was still an attractive option or, at least, an option.[Sucks on inhaler, like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a tiny floating piece of debris][checks Twitter]. Twenty-seven years later cigarettes cost around £4 for a pack of 10 and [makes a rewrite to para 3] despite having given up smoking many times before, sometimes for years at a time, I find myself having to do so again.  This suggests that 44 year-old me isn’t fundamentally any brighter than 17 year-old me.

So I have this…

[Inserts picture of inhaler][Writes inset about inserting picture][[Writes the previous inset about writing the inset]][Sets recursion to OFF]

…a little plastic doohickey, about the size of my thumb, into which I can insert a nicotine capsule.  I have this because vaping isn’t far enough removed from smoking for me to give up (if I use electronic cigarettes then, sooner or later, I switch back to real ones), the patches irritate my skin, I don’t like the gum and I can’t just go cold turkey because I have a family [checks Twitter] with whom I have to spend the day and who I am not legally allowed to murder!

[Goes to make breakfast for youngest child]

[Wipes dog paw-prints off the sofa]

[Changes ‘dohickey’ to ‘doohickey’]

[Stares vacantly at McDonald’s ad on TV]

The problem is that my brain doesn’t want to [corrects typo in last insert] try to suck nicotine vapour from a plastic cylinder, it wants [edit last word, which I first typed as “wasn’t” then edited to “want’s”, FFS] me to drive to the petrol station and spend about eight quid on a packet of fags and smoke them one after the other while it works out rationalisations for committing suicide in a manner that’s more expensive than [watches kids’ cartoons for a minute, slack-jawed] buying a brand new Ferrari and driving it off a cliff as fast as you can.

So as I try to get [checks Twitter and Facebook] through the day my brain rebels by making it almost impossible [re-reads last para] to focus on anything. [Tidies away youngest’s breakfast stuff] “Just pop out for a smoke! Things will be better after that!” it tells me [has another slack-jawed stare at kids’ TV that extends to several minutes], “Otherwise you can kiss goodbye to being able to get anything done today!”

[Watches Go Compare ad]

Fortunately I was one step ahead of my own chemical deprived brain [stands in front of fridge, eating grapes] and did all of the jobs I needed to do yesterday.  Today I can be as rambling and unfocused as I like.  All I have to do is write this blog…but look what a fucking mess I made of that!  Still, it’s all [crosses fingers] true.