Free The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry

there is a void inside me, a dark space. What can it be, this sucking black hole that is somewhere between hunger, fear, dread and pain?
    I shake my head and then my whole body, like a dog emerging from a bath.
    It will pass.
    I leave the room and descend in the elevator, listening to a couple swapping gossip on the subject of Lindsay Lohan’s dramatic departure from the hotel the night before.
    I pace around the pool. Jerry Stiller, comedian and father of the actor Ben, is doing a few slow lengths.
    ‘Hiya, kid,’ he calls out. I do love, at the age of forty-nine, to be called kid.
    After ten or twenty circuits I return to the room and sit once more before the screen.
    The black hole is still there
.
    This is all terribly, terribly wrong.
    What can it be? What
can
it be? Am I ill?
    And then with a bolt of certainty that almost knocks me from my chair I realize what it is.
    I need a cigarette
. I cannot write without a cigarette.
    It can’t be true. Surely?
    For the next three hours I try everything I can to get the writing juices going, but by midday I realize that it is useless. Either I do not deliver the screenplay or I smoke. I lift the telephone receiver.
    ‘Hello, it’s Stephen here. Could you send up a carton of Marlboro please? Yes a whole carton. Ten packs. Thanks. Bye.’
    Fast forward to April the following year, 2007. In July the ban on smoking in public will come into force throughout the United Kingdom, and the month after that I will be fifty. Now, surely, it is time to give up once and for all. I have been hypnotized by Paul McKenna in an attempt to remove the hard wiring in my brain that associates writing with tobacco. I have been given a session at the Allen Carr ‘Easy Way’ clinic in London. Neither seems to have been much use, grateful as I am to each for offering help. But there is good news …
    A new drug has arrived. Farewell Zyban, hello Champix, Pfizer’s name for a new compound called varenicline, which is not an anti-depressant but a ‘nicotinic receptor partial agonist’. What could be whatter?
    I have a course prescribed and, as with the Zyban,I continue smoking as if nothing has happened. On about the tenth day I notice that my ashtray is filled with absurdly long stubs. I have taken no more than one puff from each. By the end of the second week I find myself taking cigarettes out of the pack, staring at them as if they are strangers and replacing them. During this time we are taping
QI
two or three times a week. When that finishes I find that I am no longer buying packs of cigarettes. I have stopped smoking.
    I drive up to Norfolk and start filming for a new series of
Kingdom
. When this concludes at the end of September I fly to America to start work on a travel series.
    The real test comes later, however. In May 2008 I return to Britain from Hawaii, the last state to be visited for the documentary, and I need to sit down to write the book of the series. Only now will I see if I can, for the first time in my life, write something more than journalism, letters and occasional blogs without consuming cigarette after cigarette as I type.
    It seems, when that day dawns, that my thirty-five-year relationship with tobacco really is over.
    Writing these words as I have been, sitting in front of a computer, and recalling the past, has the old urge returned? The experience has not opened up that black hole, but somewhere, deep inside me, a trace memory twitches and thrashes like a dragon in a cave sleeping a restless sleep.
    Have I betrayed a way of looking at the world? Have I turned my back on freedom, perversity and outsiderism? Have I bourgeoisified and sold out? Most would think the question preposterous, but I do not. While the nicotine habit might rightly be characterized as dirty, dangerous,anti-social, ontologically pointless and physically deleterious and while those in its thrall might be regarded as reckless, foolish, self-indulgent, weak and perverse, I still find myself drawn