If at first you don't succeed...

It is with a heavy heart that I come before you all this morning. Acylic-bob has failed and is back on the weed.

I woke on Thursday morning in the grip of the most ferocious itch. My whole body was on fire. No, it was worse than that. It went to the centre of my being, my very soul itched. It screamed out for the balm that only tobacco could bring. Had there been a brick wall between me and a cigarette at that moment I would willingly have clawed and bitten my way through it. I would have done anything, crawled across broken glass, wrestled crocodiles, said something nice about HBC! (Whoa, steady on there Bob!) As it happens all I actually had to do was put my coat on and walk down to the papershop. So I did.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, there I was, hanging around for a while on the opposite corner checking the place out until I was certain the shop was empty. And then I snuck surreptitiously inside. The newsagent smiled in that revoltingly smug way he has, as if to say, I knew you'd never be able to keep it up I knew you’d be back. “Mornin’Bob, Usual?” he asked, feigning a bonhomie that could never truly exist between a user, like me, and his pusher. I mumbled my assent, handed over the fiver, snatched the shiny gold packet from the counter and hurriedly made my exit. No sooner than I was out of the paper-shop than my fingers were scrabbling frantically at the cellophane covering of my prize. Oh God! Would it never come off?
The first drag was indescribable - so I won't bother trying. The second and third wrapped themselves around me like a warm overcoat, comfortable, soft and re-assuring. My cares and woes, my nervous tick and throbbing headache melted away and became as ethereal as the smoke I exhaled. I was alone once more with my Blue Fairy and nothing mattered. She trailed her gauzy blue veils across my raw and fractured senses, soothing, calming and intoxicating. It was a feeling close to love, and I so desperately needed to feel loved.

Then Guilt turned up with his ugly and strident sister, Shame, in tow.
"Enjoying it?" he asked. "Nice, is it?" she queried as she nonchalantly examined her nails. Sharp and pointed, I noticed. Trapped between the two of them my Blue Fairy gathered up her discarded skirts and fled and my sense of euphoria winked out of existence, like a candle doused with iced water.
"What will they think of you once this gets out? You can't keep something like this hidden. Everyone will know." I decided to run, forgetting in my panic that there was nowhere to run to.
"Oh, look at the pathetic creature", she shrilled, in a voice which sounded like thousands of nails being scraped across hundreds of blackboards in empty Victorian classrooms, "the High and Mighty Acrylic_Bob. There. Look!” She pointed one of her razor nails at me. “Yes that's him, the one with the fag in his gob." She screached triumphantly, "He’s Smoking again!” Had there been a conveniently placed hole in the street at that point I would gladly have leapt into it. But there wasn’t. I was alone with only my B&H for company. Guilt climbed upon my back and goaded me onwards while Shame, striking sparks from the heels of her stilletto’s, marched ahead proclaiming my failure to the world.

Still, not to worry, I haven’t given up giving up. As Vivien Leigh remarked in Gone with the Wind, “after all, Tomorrow is another day”