I started smoking in university after reading everything I could get my hands on by Jean-Paul Sartre. I had come to the conclusion that God does not exist, life is meaningless and, in order not to go bonkers, man has to create his own meaning. I noticed that smoking provided meaning in two ways: first it gave smokers something to do with their hands when not otherwise occupied and, later, it afforded, as Anglicans are fond of saying, an even deeper meaning in the quest to give it up.

So I decided to start smoking. I smoked cigarettes, cigars, pipes and – other things.

A side benefit was that it annoyed a couple of Christians who inhabited the room next to mine in the university housing.

Now, of course, a person who smokes is a pariah whose standing is only a little above that of a paedophile: his compulsion must be indulged surreptitiously in dark dank alleys. Gruesome photographs of cancerous tissue have become the compulsory adornment of cigarette cartons – an attempt by government to expiate its sin of collecting so much tax from smokers.

Something I failed to consider in my existential smoking experiment was that I am allergic to tobacco; by the time I noticed, I was hooked and I spent a few decades exploring the second part of my theory.  I became an expert: I gave it up every couple of months without permanent success.

I became a Christian in 1978; one of my first prayers to the God I didn’t know was to give me the faith to believe that Jesus is who he claims to be – God – and to help me give up smoking; an odd combining of the transcendent and banal, no doubt but, nevertheless, that is what I did.

The next day I woke up with the certainty that Jesus is God, was born of a virgin, died for my sins and was bodily resurrected – I also woke up a non-smoker: I had no desire to smoke anything at all.

In the following weeks, the absence of any inclination to smoke confirmed my suspicion that something objectively real had happened to me.

Smoking had provided meaning in a sense I had not anticipated; a practical example of Romans 8:28, perhaps.