NINE BELLS vape clouds

I’ve experimented with vaping several times over the last, what, fifteen years? With very little impact on my smoking habit. Finding one that doesn’t make me cough up both lungs or sicken me with its flavour has always been a challenge. Disposable vapes are now illegal in the UK, so I’ve been looking again at the refillable rechargeable ones.

Vaping quickly became a hobbyist pursuit, somewhere between motorcycle fanciers, computer modders and technically minded drug addicts with complicated freebasing interests. Vape stores are a mess of specialist language, and pretty much every bit of every vaping device is a proprietary object. Buy a Vaporesso and you have to buy Vaporesso bits for the lifespan of the device. E-liquid, nicotine salts, freebase, other weird juices, all with their own taxonomies, strengths, combinations and subspecies.

The last time I quit smoking, I was sick for five years and only felt better when I lit up again (at a funeral). I don’t expect to fully quit this time. I don’t expect it to work at all. But I feel like I’ve deciphered enough text to order a refillable rechargeable vape pen and the correct replacement coils and the right kind of liquid — and if I’m lucky the liquid will be palatable, though it seems impossible to find a flavour that pairs with coffee or red wine the way a cigarette does – to give it a go one more time.

I don’t smoke in the house. A vape pen might let me “smoke” in the office again. There was a time when I was that typical old-world writer hunched over a keyboard with a cigarette burning next to it, coffee in the cop and whisky in the jar.