Big Tobacco’s nightmare is a low-ceilinged, grey-carpeted room on the second floor of a modern red-brick building in Raynes Park, south-west London. Just as one doesn’t look for spiritual uplift in Sainsbury’s Local, so one doesn’t enter the borough of Merton expecting to reemerge within hours fundamentally upgraded: happier, healthier and, all being well, less likely to die early from a fatal disease. But there’s beauty in the mundane, and the most profound turning points in life can occur in the least prepossessing surroundings. Can the path to enlightenment be navigated on Waze? Could my own Damascene highway be Pepys Road, SW20?
Nodding in solidarity at my fellow candidates for early expiration, I lower myself into one of the shabby recliners arranged in a semicircle confronting a single desk. Next to the desk is a large transparent bin, stuffed full of half-empty cigarette packets (or half-full cigarette packets, depending on your world view), Clipper lighters and vapes in every conceivable shape, size and explosion of candy-coloured fluorescence.
There are a dozen of us coughers and wheezers. An equal split of men and women, a range of ages from 30ish to 70ish, a rainbow of nationalities and ethnicities. For all our differences, we each have something in common: long-term addiction to nicotine. Everybody looks eager, and anxious. We are here at the global headquarters of Allen Carr’s Easyway to stub out our habits for good. To achieve what seems to me an impossible nirvana: the condition of non-smoker. £379 for the day, tea and biscuits included.
