I remember when I first started smoking. I was six. My mother used to get us kids to light her fags for her from the gas cooker in the kitchen.¹⁰ The only way to get them going properly was to take a drag on them. By the time I was eight I was stealing cigarettes from my mother. At ten, I was ‘borrowing’ money from her to buy my own with. It crept up on me insidiously, years before I had any idea smoking was bad for you, and it took me decades to kick the habit. Quitting was much tougher than not starting would have been all those years ago.

It’s so easy to tell yourself you’re not going to make a habit of drinking, or eating badly, or cutting the time too fine to get to work, or having a glass of brandy before bed (there’s a trap I fell into when I gave up the cigarettes – out of the frying pan, etc.) But the easiest time to quit any bad habit is before you start. If you can’t give up the first drink, doughnut or whatever, you’ll never have it so easy again.

Look, I’m telling you this because I’ve learnt the hard way, not because I’m some virtuous goody-goody who wouldn’t know a bad habit if it ran slap bang into them. I’ve fallen into so many bad ways over the years – and eventually clawed my way back out of most of them. And every time I’ve wished I’d never started.

I have got better though, as the years have gone by. The trick is to recognise the potential habit before it’s fully formed. That way you can take avoiding action. For example, it’s very tempting when filling up the car at the petrol station to buy a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps when you pay. Obviously it’s a popular habit, or the petrol stations wouldn’t have shelves full of the stuff next to the till. When I was young, the attendant filled the car up for you and you never got out. They didn’t sell snacks. Once fuel stations started popping up where you filled the car up yourself and then went into a shop to pay, I did actually realise right from the start how sorry I would be if I ever bought a snack. I might think it was ‘just once’ but I’d be on a slippery slope. I’m now entirely in the habit of paying for my fuel and getting out fast before the chocolate bars catch my eye – but I know how fast that habit could change if I succumbed even once.

Running late. There’s another habit it’s easy to fall into. Once you discover how forgiving people usually are when you turn up five minutes late, it’s easy to stop making such an effort to be on time. Before you know it, you’re keeping people waiting 10 or 15 minutes. That’s downright unfair and disrespectful and you know it, and you’ll definitely stop doing it… next time. You see how hard it is to break the habit? So take my advice and don’t start.