Fordyce Maxwell: 'For every so-called good cigarette there were at least 100 bad ones'

I FORGOT an anniversary for the first time this year. An important one too: 28 years since my most recent cigarette. Would I care to be more specific? Certainly – at 12.30pm on Saturday, January 17, 1981, I lit the last cigarette in a Player's packet, inhaled, and thought: "It's time I stopped this nonsense."

So I did. And if only it was as easy as those three words make it sound I would not have recalled that cigarette – and the months of coughing, edgy temper and pounds of chewing gum that followed – so clearly every January 17 since. Until this year, when it slipped my mind until a few days ago after a heavy session in the garden.

As I straightened up on one of those March days when warm sunshine and a chilly breeze make it skin-tinglingly good to be alive, whether sowing barley in a field, walking or gardening, I thought about having a cigarette.

Not physically, but remembering that it was times like these with a job well done in fresh air and sunshine that a cigarette tasted best. One of the remarkably few photographs of me with a cigarette – remarkable because for 17 years I smoked about 40 a day – show me doing just that, leaning against a fence in a boiler suit, tea in one hand, cigarette in the other, perfectly happy.

There were other times when a cigarette tasted good: the first one in the dressing room after a tough game, a crisp September morning before bending into the first potato drill, bringing in cows for milking on a May morning.

And the packaging was seductive, especially the yellow Gold Flake packet with "Honeydew" written on the side, the no-nonsense Player's Navy Cut blue and white with bearded sailor, the stark white and black of Senior Service.

It was almost a given when I started work on the farm as a teenager that a wage entitled the earner to smoke. And I did. The odd thing was that until then I had not smoked much since, as a five-year-old, I matched my father's Player's intake puff for puff with Barrett's candy sticks, down to stamping out the red tip on the granary floor as we mixed sheep feed.

So no need for a psychologist to explain why I began smoking heavily when I started work. Why I continued to smoke another 248,000 cigarettes, give or take a couple of thousand, costing more than £60,000 at today's prices is another matter, because for every 'good' cigarette there were at least 100 bad ones.

I used them as props during long days on the typewriter, on the road, in rattling tractor cabs and on open combines, meeting freelance deadlines, sweating over farm costs, lit one automatically before a tough phone call or speech. There were days when I smoked so much I felt sick.

But – the perversity of human nature and addiction – it wasn't my health or the cost that finally stopped me, it was Tom getting bronchitis several times as a baby. I stopped smoking and he never had bronchitis again.

I'm proud of that, and that I haven't had a cigarette for so long. Forgetting the anniversary for the first time suggests I might have cracked it. But I never say never.