I have been so distracted with the drinking ban and liver anxiety that I missed a little milestone that I was going to mention. The Quit-o-meter passed the 1000 cigarettes not smoked mark the other day.

It now reads:

1m 1w 5d 15:17 smoke-free, 1,073 cigs not smoked, £124.47 saved, 3d 17:25 life saved

Using my calculation of ten minutes per cigarette that makes 6.9 days of time that would have been devoted to rolling up and consuming my cigarettes have been used doing something else.

Something else I have been able to do with my spare time is worry about my health – my rashes and itches have gone into overdrive since my last meeting with the Doc.

Despite that I was able to have an enjoyable lunch over in Greenwich today. I was invited over by the Redsticks to join them and PW and K. It was in a pub which was a bit of a challenge. It wasn’t avoiding alcohol which was the challenge but working out what you can drink more than one of without feeling sick.

Luckily PW and K were also packing in cigarettes and favoured the nicotine lozenge over the patch. They have been off for over 6 months.

(PW maintains a little website and was able to explain a bit of HTML stuff to me. He assures me the title is old English for a little scamp or something but I’m not sure I believe him. He also told me a joke- there’s three balloons Mummy Balloon, Daddy Balloon and Kiddie Balloon and they all share the same bed. Kiddie wakes up in the night feeling a bit squashed by his two parents so he unties the end of Mummy Balloon and deflates her a bit to create a bit of space. He re-ties the knot. This isn’t enough to make him comfortable so he unties the Daddy Balloon’s knot and quietly deflates him a little bit too. He re-ties the knot. It’s better now for Kiddie Balloon but isn’t quite comfortable enough for him so he unties himself releases some air and re-ties himself and finally goes to sleep. Next morning at breakfast Daddy Balloon is looking decidedly angry as he says to Kiddie Balloon “I really wish I didn’t have to say this to you again. I hope you realise you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let your mother down, you’ve let me down…)

When I got home R told me that that she was going to give up alcohol for three months in sympathy with me.

“Don’t be silly darling I’m only giving up for two months”

“It’s alright because I’m not going to do it as seriously as you” she said with a straight face.

Is it harder to give up for three months unseriously than to give up seriously for two I wonder?