They say you never forget your first.

For me, it was just one of many misguided efforts my parents made to raise me as a good, rule-abiding, young man.

I mean, that's why you give the toddler one of the cigars his Dad's boss smokes, isn't it?

Call it aversion therapy and it won't look like a stupid act of sadism, and when the kid pukes up his tiny brown arsehole, you can really rub it in with a condescending homily, and the little chap will be put off the demon weed for life.

Some people say I'm contrary: the kinder ones look at the same traits and call it "paradoxical". Anyway, Little Me *loved* that cigar. There was no chundering, and I asked for another.

***

The following years were marked by occasional furtive puffs plus, now and then, a ciggy pinched from my grandfather.

Life changed. My parents divorced, and I spent time in Dad's custody, then was relinquished to Mum and her new husband.

When I was ten, I walked into one of the few corner shops in the small country town where we now lived, and laid down the few cents needed for a packet of ten Escort filters.

Mum knew I was smoking. The odour's hard to conceal. She decided to tell me that she wouldn't give me pocket money if I was going to buy tobacco. That was the week I started breeding fancy mice and selling them to a petshop in the next (larger) town.

I managed to maintain the habit of at least one cigarette a day through primary school.

My first year-and-a-half of secondary school was at a boarding establishment. Without going into it too deeply, I'll just say tobacco was only part of the fun. Shit got a little serious, and my survival was more a matter of luck than one of determination.

After the inevitable expulsion (a fun episode of its own), I attended a state high school (for very liberal interpretations of the word "attend"). While it was also hell, at least it was a hell more easily escaped, whether via the bell at day's end or, by day, via a circuitous route including an underground run of four-foot-diameter storm drains.

We'd moved from the farm, but I got another mouse-breeding operation going, and later worked a casual job on Saturdays, packing at a supermarket.

The same supermarket chain, at a store an hour's bus-commute away, provided my first full-time job when I'd had enough of school. I was smoking habitually now, in my room at home, on the bus, in the break-room at work, in the pictures when I went out... the world of the early 1970s was smoky, and I was doing my bit.

For variety, I used a pipe. I can still get drooling at the idea of a metal-stemmed Falcon, with the tar-trap and heat dissipation tube, and a tin of MacBaren's Plum Cake.

Apart from the nice feeling when I smoked, and the flavour, there were the social aspects.

Nice Guys don't smoke, and not being seen as a Nice Guy suited me. Some girls love a villain, and to me it seemed that boring people in my age bracket would avoid smokers.

Actually, lots of people avoided smokers then, as now. I found that convenient: I don't socialise much in person.

When I moved on to office work, it was good to be a smoker. People don't hang over your desk or workstation if there's smoke rising into their faces.

My out-of-work life gave me many reasons to smoke, too. At peak, I was inhaling about sixty unfiltered Camels a day.

The Abominable Woman, that violent little contributor to my end-of-the-eighties breakdown, smoked too.

And after I left her, job, and city, far behind, I still smoked.

I had tried quitting a few times before I left her, and tried hypnosis, replacement nicotine sources, and total withdrawal. I learned that, for me, the addiction has a quiet, calm, rational, friendly voice.

My tobacco addiction could tell me that I was stressed, and that after a ciggie, I would be so much better equipped to cope with whatever was bugging me, and then I could get on with the serious business of quitting, after all the stress was gone.

I could hardly credit that voice with being part of me. It was smooth, persuasive, suave, in a way I could never be, even in my best Philosopher-with-pipe pose.

Indeed (and I never until this moment made the connection) Voice of Addiction had many qualities in common with Voice of God when I had the bout of mental illness which culminated in my getting heavily religious. Those of you with psych qualifications can roll that one around and see what falls out!

But that was a later madness. Let's step back into a time when I've come back from exile, absolutely broke, to savour the heady delights of urban unemployment and whatever black-market work I could find, living in my ex's garden shed.

My poison of choice for the last few years had been Marlboro Red. I'd gone off Camels when the burning tip of one fell off when I was sitting on the bog and...(oh, yes, the little blister made the poor thing look like a turkey!)

Anyway, you've got to see the world from my squinty little viewpoint as it was then. It was late 1990, and Uncle Sam was saving the free world for his oil-baron pals.

Thanks to certain happenings at the job I'd resigned before quitting town, I had very good reasons to be personally unhappy with the US military.

CNN feeds were punctuating everything on telly. The same Scud footage, again and again and a-fucking-gain.

The US military-industrial complex was in my face, and I turned, yet again, to my shirt pocket for... a product which was taking up a considerable part of my unemployment money, and turning it into taxes paid, and profits repatriated to America.

With a sudden chilling burst of clarity, I screwed up the half-full packet, and binned it. Finished!

I can't remember how my last smoke tasted.

I dare not taste my next one.