I would LOVE a fag!

I stopped smoking over eleven years ago now; not had a single puff since I stubbed out that last Purple Silk Cut on January 5th 2003. Sigh. How I miss it.

There has not been a single day in all these years where I don't wish I could finish off a nice meal by sitting back in my chair, and lighting up. I always say that if I heard an announcement on the radio that the world was going to end in ten minutes, I would use that time to run down to the shop and buy a packet of twenty, and smoke them two at a time all the way back home.

However, since that is never going to happen, I intend to go to my grave at a ripe old age - and hopefully with lungs which will have become almost as good as they were before I started filling them with nicotine and tar at age fourteen. So, when I saw an advert looking for volunteers aged between fifty and seventy-five, who were either smokers or ex-smokers, I was happy to put my name down. This is for a research project being carried out in Tayside and Glasgow, where they are assessing a new kind of blood test to see if it can identify lung cancer at an early stage, when it is much easier to treat. I've been taking part in the study, and I have really enjoyed it.

Initially I had an interview, and a blood test taken. Now I climb on a bus every few months, and trundle through to the Clinical Research Centre at Ninewells, the huge Dundee teaching hospital, to have a scan or x-ray. After itI have a coffee and a browse through some of the shops in the hospital foyer. I could drive there, but parking is a nightmare, and it is so nice just to sit on a bus and daydream.

Today I spent my journey along the dual carriageway between Perth and Dundee counting YES and NO Thanks signs put up by the farmers in their fields. Not nearly as many (only 2 NO's in total, and about 4 YES's) as there used to be years ago when we were in the run up to a General Election, and the fields would be awash with giant blue banners. Muriel Gray (journalist; not seen or heard of nearly enough nowadays) once said the Perth & Kinross electorate would vote for a coffee table if it had a Tory rosette on! Of course that was in the day of the hideous late Nicholas Fairbairn, who was eventually supplanted by SNP.

Anyway, I digress: I think they are still looking for volunteers - they need 10,000 people for the study to be effectively tested. Check out www.eclsstudy.org if you are interested.