The butt end of my days and ways

Here’s the thing with giving up smoking. Everyone tells you how good you
are, how strong-willed, how sensible and decent. But it’s nonsense.
It’s not like that. Giving up on fags is giving up on immortality.
It’s not strong will. It’s the spirit submitting to the body. It’s
the triumph of fear. It’s middle age. Stopping smoking is a
milestone on the road away from golden, fire-breathing youth towards Crown green
bowls. And I knew it. I felt bad. I could breathe but that’s
small recompense.

A.A. Gill, who wrote the above, took up hunting stags in craggy Hebridean terrain when he stopped smoking, a vice which is bad for the stags but not so damaging to the livers. I stopped smoking almost a year ago now, give or take a few puffs, and I’m still looking for the payback vice to balance my life. Vice, I’ve always thought, is kind of nice. One always needs to pursue at least one vice to an immoderate degree, tweaking the utilitarian formula to read something like ‘behaviour which causes the least damage to the fewest number.’ Hunting stags in Scotland is not an option for me and I don’t have a glib single grrl in the city line about hunting stags in the Cross at my fingertips. So, the question is, what is my new vice to be? There is a marathon hazily figuring in my plans for 2009 and a motorbike license to be won in the next fortnight. Credible arguments can be advanced as to the viciousness of long distance running and hooning around the city on a motorbike; certainly neither of these last suggest I’m giving up on immortality quite yet. Still, I’m not sure whether these will provide the masochist thrills and spills that smoking provided for so long, hi-jinks that have been absent from my life for so long.