TPB note: I am 77 years old as I write this (in early 2017). 60 years ago I made a good decision. Like most 17 year olds my friends and I were exploring possibilities, and one of these was the idea of smoking. It turned out that after two 'puffs', I hated the idea of smoking and have never been involved with smoking ever since. I know that smoking is addictive, and I know that for some people smoking 'calms the nerves'. For me ... I was simply repulsed by the whole idea of smoking. For my parents smoking had a different trajectory. They we young in the 20s and 30s when smoking was 'fashionable' and they smoked a little in social settings. But then came the war. We lived in the outskirts of London and very early in the war, early in 1940 my parents built a bomb shelter in the garden. It was a reinforced concrete box about 8' X 8' X 8' in size deep under the ground with about 3 feet of earth on top. I was an infant. I did not know anything of what was really going on, but my parents did. Social smoking ended and smoking to calm the nerves began. This led to addiction and an inability to quit, not matter how hard they tried. Eventually my mother died from emphysema ... a smoking related ailment. So I was lucky. I made a decision not to smoke, and 60 years later my health is far better than it would have been if I had become a smoker ... in fact, statistically I might well have already died!