Opinion | Naked truth behind quitting cigarettes

Recent speculation in the British media that The Sun newspaper might be ending the practice of having a "Page 3" photo of a topless woman got me thinking.

How times change - and how we change with them.

From my mid-teens onwards, I started smoking cigarettes. As soon as I could afford to, I graduated to so-called king sized ones, and smoked a packet of 20 per day. It made me feel more adult and hence more confident. My friends all smoked too. How we - our bodies, our clothes, our breath - must have smelled. Goodness only knows how we were able to attract girlfriends, but we all did.

I remember smoking in class at college. When one particularly fussy lecturer objected, I kindly offered to move to the rear of the hall so as not to disturb him (he was not mollified).

In the early '70s, when I arrived in Hong Kong, I was still smoking. It was pretty common. You could smoke on the upper deck of buses, for example. Planes had smoking and non-smoking sections of seating. Some top-end restaurants were just starting to introduce the idea of non-smoking sections, but enforcement was pretty casual. One of the first stories I wrote for the Star newspaper, which earned me a byline on the front page, was when I reported that smoking would not be allowed on the future mass transit railway ("Tube Shock: No Smoking").

But in August 1977 I made one of the best decisions of my life, certainly the one with the biggest impact on my overall health, and stopped smoking - cold turkey. Not because my then wife objected, not because I had become more health conscious, but because someone who could not speak "told" me something. My firstborn son, then six months old, awoke in his cot one morning with what was quite clearly a smoker's cough. I couldn't handle the guilt, simple as that.