Being a smoker involves a huge amount of self-deception, says Dan Jenkins, who had his eyes opened at a course which has proved hugely successful in helping people to quit.

MY grandmother on my mother's side was a warm-hearted woman, with the most infectious giggle I have ever heard.

She was forever confusing the names of her grandchildren, yet was capable of organising a full Sunday dinner at family gatherings, cooking three separate sittings for 30 people.

I visited her in hospital the week before she died. She was always a small woman, but the cancer had eaten away her insides, leaving her face just skin stretched taut over a skull, a tortured death mask. Her brain had suffered just as badly and she slipped in and out of consciousness.

As I was about to leave, she turned to me, her face contorted with pain, bony fingers gripping my arm with surprising strength. For a brief moment she pierced through the haze of powerful pain-relieving drugs. Her eyes pinned mine and she begged me to kill her and end her torment.

I loved her dearly and it is a moment that will haunt me for the rest of my life. But even though I knew cigarettes had killed her, I carried on smoking.

My father's mother was a matriarch who ruled her vast tribe like a Celtic queen, wrapping us all in a regal, iron-clad love. I remember her bringing me Smarties as a child, then taking great delight in winning them off me at cards.

As a young man I watched her felled by a succession of strokes, the fierce light behind her eyes growing dimmer with each one.

I loved her dearly. But even though I knew cigarettes had been her undoing, I carried on smoking.

Almost every smoker knows someone who died from a smoking-related disease. That we can be aware of this and still cheerfully puff away is an act of Orwellian doublethink on a gargantuan scale.

If smokers thought regularly about the toxins and carcinogens in cigarettes, we would all collapse in blubbering heaps every day, terrified of the cancer or heart disease that surely lurks around the corner.

If smokers thought rationally about their habit, we would all try our hardest to stop smoking.

Like nearly all smokers, I started as a teenager, during those glorious years when I felt anything was possible and I was indestructible. After 12 years averaging about 20 a day, I felt like a 27-year-old trapped in the body of a middle aged man.

A series of failed attempts at stopping smoking had led to massive weight gain, as I overcompensated for a lack of fags with food. I wheezed after climbing a flight of stairs, had regular nosebleeds and terrifying, inexplicable chest pains.

So one day I stopped. I took up jogging and started off battling my way 100 yards to the post box, where I would collapse in a fit of coughing, before struggling back.

After a couple of months, I could manage four miles and was never going to smoke again. Just over a year later, I was back on the cigarettes, after having decided to "treat" myself while on holiday.

The last six months or so I have spent back in a frustrating cycle of giving up and starting again - usually all in the space of a day, so when the opportunity popped up to try the Allen Carr Easyway method, I jumped at it.

THE day does not get off to a good start. I get the venue wrong and miss the first half hour of the session and have smoked seven fags as I frantically drive around Gateshead, looking for the right place.

I walk sheepishly into the Swallow Hotel and join around 15 or so other people who have paid nearly £200 to finally leave smoking behind them.

They are mostly women, but from all walks of life and aged from their early 20s up to 60s. There is a couple from Tyneside in my group who have done the course before and lapsed, but are determined this time to make it work.

Tony Attrill runs the North-East clinic. The method might not work for everyone, but he offers a money-back guarantee and free support sessions for those who do go back to cigarettes.

Tony boasts a 95 per cent success rate. If cigarettes kill around half of smokers, this means he has potentially saved hundreds of lives over the last decade.

I sit down next to a dustbin crammed full of cigarettes, and as he talks about smokers and smoking, my eyes are drawn time and again to a half-full packet of my brand, Marlboro Lights, sitting invitingly near the apex of this fag mountain.

Tony smoked for 25 years before attending an Allen Carr clinic 11 years ago. It changed his life. He promptly switched careers and became the Easyway apostle for the North-East.

The Easyway method essentially involves taking one at a time the reasons why we smoke, and exposing each as a fallacy.

As the session wears on (it lasts nearly six hours), we are allowed regular cigarette breaks and I enjoy them, feeling no different. The breaks are also where those taking part in the session learn more about each other.

There is a young woman from Stockton who is desperate to give up because her parents don't know she smokes. A well-dressed woman in her 40s confides that she is prepared to give up cigarettes, but will miss smoking cannabis.

The afternoon is spent looking at where we go wrong when trying to stop smoking and how to beat those nicotine cravings. There is no quick fix or magic wand, but I gradually feel like I am being equipped with the mental resilience to pack in smoking.

The physical side of nicotine withdrawal lasts only three days, but it is dealing with the psychological impact where most quitters come undone.

We are told to smoke our last cigarette at 2.30pm. I had expected to feel the terror that usually comes with giving up, the thought that I can never have a smoke again.

This time, I can taste those carcinogenic chemicals and don't enjoy the cigarette at all. Those around me feel the same.

We go back in, Tony pronounces us all non-smokers and congratulates us, before a short session of group hypnotherapy.

And it works. I go out that night and do not smoke. I experience stress at work, and do not smoke.

A week later, in a moment of madness, I have four fags. That night, I wake up and am violently ill, my body rejecting the toxins I have unexpectedly dumped in it.

And that is the last time I have smoked, or will ever smoke again. I don't feel re-born, there is no epiphany, but I refuse to be a slave now to something I don't really enjoy and that would one day kill me.

As Ewan McGregor's character in the film Trainspotting says: "I am choosing life".

* For further details on the Allen Carr Easyway Clinic, contact 0191-581 0449.