Ahem
ahem, ahem. Ahroogharghchoogargh cack-cack-cack.
The Nightingales are coughing near
the convent of the Sacred Heart
Sorry.
My first blog post, two years ago now, was about early-morning coughing. I wrote it in a whimsical mood, sparing the messy details of hawking and retching because I had some sympathy for my reader (all one of her), and instead imagined the rattle and bark of the engine of a First World War fighter aircraft springing into life as the dawn sun peeped through the trees and hedges somewhere in Flanders.
My early morning coughing fits do prey on my imagination sometimes, for all the wrong reasons. I gave up smoking a few months before I moved into the station, sixteen years ago. I stopped because I had done some sums and realised that to get out of the horribly featureless box of a modern maisonette and into somewhere I had dreamt of for nearly all my life was going to take more funds than I could count on getting my hands on. It was the middle of a housing slump; my five-room ground floor maisonette was now worth £5000 less than it had been when I had bought it three years earlier. And in addition, I was giving up my secure job I had held for three years and going back into the uncertainties of freelancing.
At the time of which I write, cigarettes still hadn't reached the incredible prices that they command today, but I worked out that if I stopped my forty-a-day Red More habit immediately, the savings would pay most of my living costs over the next three months until the start of a possible contract in Southampton where they were making some new underwater fibre-optic cables to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans as part of the FLAG project. That contract, assuming I got it, would allow me to sell up, at a loss, and move Westward, away from the clamour and crush of the booming Thames Valley, to start a new life in the peace of the countryside.
So, having double-checked the figures, I threw away the last six cigarettes in the packet, and stopped drinking coffee for three months until the need to smoke felt less intense. It was as easy as that; no patches, no chewing gum, no mints, no support groups where you have to listen to the ravings of a wretch who imagines that he's worse than anyone else in the room and wants them to reassure him that, yes, he really is a special case and deserves everyone's attention. No need for group hugs and chest-baring confessions; I preferred to suffer in silence.
A few years later, when someone was trying to sell me life insurance, I asked the question about having previously smoked, and was told in reply that the insurance companies considered that after ten years of abstinence, you were equal to someone who had never smoked at all. Equal, or equivalent, I can't remember the precise weasel-words, but the gist of them remains.
I still find that hard to believe. Can a lifetime habit that had at one point reached sixty-a-day be undone after ten years? Especially when for some of that time I had smoked cigars instead of cigarettes, believing that they were less harmful, but I knew that I was inhaling the smoke, which cigar smokers were not supposed to do, and was up to twenty-a-day; partly because there were cards inside the packets to collect, and I wanted the last couple of famous aircraft, a few of the hedgerow wildlife, and one or two railway trains to make up complete sets. You'll gather from that confession that I am of the compulsive type. It worked for me; where I had previously been a compulsive smoker, so I switched to becoming a compulsive stopper.
If it were true that ten years or more of abstinence could make you born-again, lung-wise; how come, I was wondering a few years ago, did I have such a hacking early-morning cough at certain points in the year? Did life sometimes withdraw the recuperation bonus for those whom it considered had tried to cheat their way out of paying for the pleasure they had enjoyed for so long? And yes, let me remind you all, smoking is a pleasure. I know that smokers smell terribly to non-smokers, and I know that they sometimes seem to be part of a closed society that has the right to hold secret meetings in private rooms, or recognise each other in railway carriages and airport lounges and pick each other up in clubs and bars by asking for and accepting lights from strangers, but the real reason for smoking is that it is enjoyable. It is, believe me.
Non-smokers will never know this pleasure, of course, and probably will never understand it either. One of the things I missed most when I stopped smoking was the company of smokers. I always found them easy to talk with, more tolerant of personal differences than the fervent non-smokers I also knew, and, in some way, more tolerant of other people's habits, such as drinking, or of quietly farting and not apologising for the offence. Of course, smokers have one of the best defences against the wind-breakers, except in crowded tube trains where they are banned from taking pre-emptive measures.
It was the tubes that first made me worried about whether I had possibly left it a little late to give up. Not the tubes inside of me, but those underneath the ground. A couple of years after I moved into the station, I took work in London that meant I had to stay in lodgings through the week and only see my Wiltshire home for a few brief hours each weekend, rather like my recent sojourn in Lincolnshire. I noticed quite quickly that, whereas a few years before I had been able to run up the escalators to reach the top and light up, I now struggled up at the same rate as those around me. I put this down to the extra weight I had put on when I stopped smoking, and started going out to Finsbury Park in the evenings to try and jog it off, but the increased bulk of my mid-section meant that I could no longer sustain the fluid motion I had been previously proud of, and after a few yards the wobble would get out of control and I was forced to slow to a shuffling walk to try and stop the tank-slapper that my bulging belly was threatening to throw on me.
I didn't keep a diary during that period of my life, so I can't look back and try to see where I first began to cough as soon as I got out of bed some mornings. I do now have a few years of notes that I can look back through and realise that it is the crisp cold mornings that affect me most, not the damp foggy ones. And since I am still getting these hack-attacks even after losing some weight and regaining fitness, I am worried that it might be caused by something other than my previous smoking excesses. Could it, for instance, be a result of my country life-style? Must I consider giving up something else I enjoy?
The station has no mains gas, nobody in the area does, nor are we likely to, and I don't have oil-fired central heating. I burn coal in an old Rayburn room-heater with a back-boiler to supply hot water to the bath and warm water to the cast-iron radiators I scrounged from the factory in Southampton where the cables were being made. I burn coal in the sitting-room fireplace and wood on an open fire in the large room I call the office, which was really the booking hall in the days when the station was active. Visitors, when the fire is cheerfully crackling away, always remark how wonderful it must be to have real wood fires. Yes, there is a definite cheerfulness and a radiant heat they you won't get from the smug smoothness of pressed-steel panel radiators, but I wonder how long the visitor's envy would last if they saw the work that goes into running solid fuel fires for warmth? The labour of carrying in the wood and coal, the need to keep kindling dry, and, of course, the need to sweep the hearths clean and carry out the ashes each day.
That's where I am worried that my coughing might be coming from, the contaminating dust that wanders invisibly throughout each room as the fires burn and produce their heat and ash. I am worried that on cold dry mornings, the sudden change of air temperature in my lungs as I breathe in disturbs the fine particles that have built up inside me, and the cough is an instinctive reaction to get rid of these invaders. If so, what is happening to me on the mornings when I don't cough? Is there no dust to be expelled, or is there no helpful burst of cold air to trick me into getting rid of the particles?
These thoughts were stirred by a program I watched recently, which described how some of the rescue workers who rushed into the choking dust clouds as the Twin Towers collapsed were starting to experience respiratory problems a few years afterwards, and, typically, the administration that at the time was so proud to be videoed standing alongside them was now distancing themselves from the sad wheezing workers who were finding it hard to climb stairs or carry equipment around. The dust, which a government body had insisted at the time presented no threat to humans, was reportedly building up in the lungs and causing scar tissue to grow over the particles, and consequently giving the sufferer a significant loss of lung capacity.
The 911 workers will, I hope, be able to claim compensation from the US Government; if they cannot, it will be one of the most disgraceful disregarding of human sacrifice that one could think of in the past few years. Smokers, almost paradoxically, it seems, are also able to sue the tobacco companies for profiting from their ailments. But I, living in my railway station, with my wood and coal fires, cannot sue anybody if I find I am going to cough my way to an early grave. I have enjoyed their warmth and comfort for the past sixteen years, but there may have been a hidden price that I am only just coming to realise.
Or, of course, it's me indulging in a little hypochondria. I rode the bike up the steep hills to Shaftesbury for two consecutive days last week, as part of the cure for a depressing cold I had been experiencing that was leaving me breathless after working for a couple of hours. I can't be all that ill if I can pedal up a 400-foot climb at my age.
Go on, feel sorry for me, you know you want to.
The Nightingales are coughing near
the convent of the Sacred Heart
Sorry.
My first blog post, two years ago now, was about early-morning coughing. I wrote it in a whimsical mood, sparing the messy details of hawking and retching because I had some sympathy for my reader (all one of her), and instead imagined the rattle and bark of the engine of a First World War fighter aircraft springing into life as the dawn sun peeped through the trees and hedges somewhere in Flanders.
My early morning coughing fits do prey on my imagination sometimes, for all the wrong reasons. I gave up smoking a few months before I moved into the station, sixteen years ago. I stopped because I had done some sums and realised that to get out of the horribly featureless box of a modern maisonette and into somewhere I had dreamt of for nearly all my life was going to take more funds than I could count on getting my hands on. It was the middle of a housing slump; my five-room ground floor maisonette was now worth £5000 less than it had been when I had bought it three years earlier. And in addition, I was giving up my secure job I had held for three years and going back into the uncertainties of freelancing.
At the time of which I write, cigarettes still hadn't reached the incredible prices that they command today, but I worked out that if I stopped my forty-a-day Red More habit immediately, the savings would pay most of my living costs over the next three months until the start of a possible contract in Southampton where they were making some new underwater fibre-optic cables to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans as part of the FLAG project. That contract, assuming I got it, would allow me to sell up, at a loss, and move Westward, away from the clamour and crush of the booming Thames Valley, to start a new life in the peace of the countryside.
So, having double-checked the figures, I threw away the last six cigarettes in the packet, and stopped drinking coffee for three months until the need to smoke felt less intense. It was as easy as that; no patches, no chewing gum, no mints, no support groups where you have to listen to the ravings of a wretch who imagines that he's worse than anyone else in the room and wants them to reassure him that, yes, he really is a special case and deserves everyone's attention. No need for group hugs and chest-baring confessions; I preferred to suffer in silence.
A few years later, when someone was trying to sell me life insurance, I asked the question about having previously smoked, and was told in reply that the insurance companies considered that after ten years of abstinence, you were equal to someone who had never smoked at all. Equal, or equivalent, I can't remember the precise weasel-words, but the gist of them remains.
I still find that hard to believe. Can a lifetime habit that had at one point reached sixty-a-day be undone after ten years? Especially when for some of that time I had smoked cigars instead of cigarettes, believing that they were less harmful, but I knew that I was inhaling the smoke, which cigar smokers were not supposed to do, and was up to twenty-a-day; partly because there were cards inside the packets to collect, and I wanted the last couple of famous aircraft, a few of the hedgerow wildlife, and one or two railway trains to make up complete sets. You'll gather from that confession that I am of the compulsive type. It worked for me; where I had previously been a compulsive smoker, so I switched to becoming a compulsive stopper.
If it were true that ten years or more of abstinence could make you born-again, lung-wise; how come, I was wondering a few years ago, did I have such a hacking early-morning cough at certain points in the year? Did life sometimes withdraw the recuperation bonus for those whom it considered had tried to cheat their way out of paying for the pleasure they had enjoyed for so long? And yes, let me remind you all, smoking is a pleasure. I know that smokers smell terribly to non-smokers, and I know that they sometimes seem to be part of a closed society that has the right to hold secret meetings in private rooms, or recognise each other in railway carriages and airport lounges and pick each other up in clubs and bars by asking for and accepting lights from strangers, but the real reason for smoking is that it is enjoyable. It is, believe me.
Non-smokers will never know this pleasure, of course, and probably will never understand it either. One of the things I missed most when I stopped smoking was the company of smokers. I always found them easy to talk with, more tolerant of personal differences than the fervent non-smokers I also knew, and, in some way, more tolerant of other people's habits, such as drinking, or of quietly farting and not apologising for the offence. Of course, smokers have one of the best defences against the wind-breakers, except in crowded tube trains where they are banned from taking pre-emptive measures.
It was the tubes that first made me worried about whether I had possibly left it a little late to give up. Not the tubes inside of me, but those underneath the ground. A couple of years after I moved into the station, I took work in London that meant I had to stay in lodgings through the week and only see my Wiltshire home for a few brief hours each weekend, rather like my recent sojourn in Lincolnshire. I noticed quite quickly that, whereas a few years before I had been able to run up the escalators to reach the top and light up, I now struggled up at the same rate as those around me. I put this down to the extra weight I had put on when I stopped smoking, and started going out to Finsbury Park in the evenings to try and jog it off, but the increased bulk of my mid-section meant that I could no longer sustain the fluid motion I had been previously proud of, and after a few yards the wobble would get out of control and I was forced to slow to a shuffling walk to try and stop the tank-slapper that my bulging belly was threatening to throw on me.
I didn't keep a diary during that period of my life, so I can't look back and try to see where I first began to cough as soon as I got out of bed some mornings. I do now have a few years of notes that I can look back through and realise that it is the crisp cold mornings that affect me most, not the damp foggy ones. And since I am still getting these hack-attacks even after losing some weight and regaining fitness, I am worried that it might be caused by something other than my previous smoking excesses. Could it, for instance, be a result of my country life-style? Must I consider giving up something else I enjoy?
The station has no mains gas, nobody in the area does, nor are we likely to, and I don't have oil-fired central heating. I burn coal in an old Rayburn room-heater with a back-boiler to supply hot water to the bath and warm water to the cast-iron radiators I scrounged from the factory in Southampton where the cables were being made. I burn coal in the sitting-room fireplace and wood on an open fire in the large room I call the office, which was really the booking hall in the days when the station was active. Visitors, when the fire is cheerfully crackling away, always remark how wonderful it must be to have real wood fires. Yes, there is a definite cheerfulness and a radiant heat they you won't get from the smug smoothness of pressed-steel panel radiators, but I wonder how long the visitor's envy would last if they saw the work that goes into running solid fuel fires for warmth? The labour of carrying in the wood and coal, the need to keep kindling dry, and, of course, the need to sweep the hearths clean and carry out the ashes each day.
That's where I am worried that my coughing might be coming from, the contaminating dust that wanders invisibly throughout each room as the fires burn and produce their heat and ash. I am worried that on cold dry mornings, the sudden change of air temperature in my lungs as I breathe in disturbs the fine particles that have built up inside me, and the cough is an instinctive reaction to get rid of these invaders. If so, what is happening to me on the mornings when I don't cough? Is there no dust to be expelled, or is there no helpful burst of cold air to trick me into getting rid of the particles?
These thoughts were stirred by a program I watched recently, which described how some of the rescue workers who rushed into the choking dust clouds as the Twin Towers collapsed were starting to experience respiratory problems a few years afterwards, and, typically, the administration that at the time was so proud to be videoed standing alongside them was now distancing themselves from the sad wheezing workers who were finding it hard to climb stairs or carry equipment around. The dust, which a government body had insisted at the time presented no threat to humans, was reportedly building up in the lungs and causing scar tissue to grow over the particles, and consequently giving the sufferer a significant loss of lung capacity.
The 911 workers will, I hope, be able to claim compensation from the US Government; if they cannot, it will be one of the most disgraceful disregarding of human sacrifice that one could think of in the past few years. Smokers, almost paradoxically, it seems, are also able to sue the tobacco companies for profiting from their ailments. But I, living in my railway station, with my wood and coal fires, cannot sue anybody if I find I am going to cough my way to an early grave. I have enjoyed their warmth and comfort for the past sixteen years, but there may have been a hidden price that I am only just coming to realise.
Or, of course, it's me indulging in a little hypochondria. I rode the bike up the steep hills to Shaftesbury for two consecutive days last week, as part of the cure for a depressing cold I had been experiencing that was leaving me breathless after working for a couple of hours. I can't be all that ill if I can pedal up a 400-foot climb at my age.
Go on, feel sorry for me, you know you want to.
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 2:33 pm
8 Comments:
I sympathize with anything that gets in the way of enjoying life, of course.
Being boringly practical, the possible reasons for your affliction, it seems to me, are many. Expert advice might be indicated.
The causes could be internal (disease, etc) or external: the famous "environmental factors". As well as coal and wood dust, people can be allergic to tree pollen or chemicals in the structure of buildings. And who knows what has been left behind after decades of trains thundering through the station carrying all sorts of cargoes as well as microbe-infested humans?
Life is a race against time and time always wins. But we can give the bitch a run for her money.
I think you're right... smoker or not, we're exposed to all sorts of stuff, choking perfumes in closed spaces, aromatics from kitchen / house cleaners and polishes, etc.
It is about balance, I still smoke (as you know) but I balance it, I heat with a nice clean gas fire, I eat sparingly of "proper" food, home made cualiflower cheese, home made toad in the hole, home made curry, I avoid kitchen and household chemicals and perfumes (soap and water is enough for anyone) and I insist on at least one room being warm and comfortable, while on the other hand sleeping under a warm duvet (which, importantly, is turned down and aired every day) in an unheated room with the window open.
Get your start-o-matic installed and use it to provide electric heat for one room, I really cannot recommend those quartz tube heaters (remember I showed you one in my "workshop") enough because a 2kw fan heater will not heat the workshop adequately but the 1.5 kw quartz job will turn it to shirt sleeve warm in a couple of minutes, and infra red is safer than anything else, including electrically heated air...
Most of all, and I've said this before, allot yourself a space and a time allowance to do the things you enjoy, and don't let anything else take priority over it.
A very old and favourite obscure quotation.
"death is not the end of life, character is the end of life."
I hope it's just a bit of good old hypochondria, but what lovelily written hypochondria, if so. I even had to turn off Radio 4 while I was reading - only Juliet Stevenson - so I could concentrate more fully on your words and enjoy your obvious charm and warmth.
Lovely to read about smoking. I've given up, using the you-method, and miss it for exactly the same reasons you do.
Thanks for the lovely read.
Smoking is my most expensive pleasure - even the vodka costs considerably less - and perhaps if the government weren't so hell bent on my quitting, I bloody well would. But I can tell you for nothing that a natural fire will fuck you up. As an asthmatic (and a twat for smoking, yes yes) I can tell the change in my lung capacity just by spending a day or two in London - but spending time at the folks' place, where they only light the fire several times a week (and aside from that live in entirely countrified and unpolluted surroundings), my lungs feel like I've been on 60 a day by the time I leave. My Mum's cough (smoker)isn't so bad but my Dad's cough (non smoker) has deteriorated since living there.
agreeing with paula-same lungs, same history.
the morning cough could be ended by something as simple as an antihistimine taken the night before, though. that worked for me.
ST: As usual, I am too scared to go and seek expert advice for fear of finding out there is actually something the matter with me.
JB: Yes, the quartz tube heaters seem to be one way forward, although fitting closed stoves in the fireplaces might also be another option.
Pleite: One other factor that might have helped me give up smoking was that, in changing jobs and moving away, I effectively parted company with all my smoking friends for a while, otherwiae it might not have been so easy.
Paula & FN: (since you seem to be of one accord), tghe puzzle to me is that LP, an asthma sufferer who has never smoked, doesn't have the coughs, while I do. A bit liker Paula's dad, I suppose.
Here's another thought: did you have whooping cough as a child? Or, if you are younger than I, a whooping cough vaccination?
Having either the disease or the vaccination confers a "lifetime" immunity. But the "lifetime" is only about 50 years!
Combined with open fires...ouch.
dinamow: I don't know what I was vaccinated against, but I grew uo in the great age of jabs, so I probably had whooping-cough. I didn't know it had an expiry date though. I did ask the doctor last year about tetanus after treading on a nail clearing up a bonfire site, and was told that after haning had two boosters a person is considered to be protected for life.
Strangely, one of the cats has something that sounds suspiciously like whooping-cough. I must investigate further.
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