I have had  two friends who were chain smokers. Each smoked in excess of 100 cigarettes per day. One was a man who lived in Yugoslavia,  and another, a lady, who lived in Wales.

I used to travel around Yugoslavia with my Serbian friend, and we often shared hotel rooms. As soon as he woke in the morning,  he had his first cigarette, and last thing at night, after cleaning his teeth, he had to have another. One year when I  met him, he told me that his doctor had told him to give up smoking. He decided not to give up completely, but to limit himself to one cigarette per hour. While he did this, he was permanently distracted because every few minutes he had to look at his watch to discover how much longer he had to wait before he could light the next cigarette.  Eventually,  he abandoned the effort, and returned to chain smoking.

My Welsh friend, let us call her ‘F’, smoked at least as many cigarettes as my friend in Yugoslavia, if not more.  Each summer, we used to spend a few days with her at her home in Wales. When the windows were open, as they were often in summer, you could smell cigarette smoke as far away as 50 feet from the house. The place seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of cigarette fumes.

One year, F accompanied us on a long-haul flight. She knew that she would be unable to smoke during the 11 hours we were on board. Realising this, she quilted smoking overnight – she was a very determined woman. Within 24 hours, she went from smoking over 100 cigarettes per day to none at all.

To her credit, she never resumed smoking. She told us that one of the benefits of having given up was that she did not need to have the walls within her house repainted every year because they were no longer becoming discoloured by smoke from the cigarettes.

Both F and my Yugoslav friend are no more. Interestingly, neither of them suffered from, or died of lung cancer. I miss both of them.