Cat, bag, out of

OK, so last night at my flatmate's birthday bash I told loads of people about my little experiment. I was greeted with largely slack-jawed incomprehension and what looked, to my smug and pious eyes, a wee bit like envy. Well how about that? I assumed all I'd get would be laughter and a fresh pint.

Still, today I feel great, and everyone else is hungover as hell, and yet I still had a fantastic night topped off with a slightly off-piste fish curry. Well, they're my rules so I figure I can bend them now and again... after six pints of lime and soda, about nine cigarettes avoided while standing in a courtyard surrounded by probably 50+ people puffing away, one poppadom and a much-needed fresh lassi didn't feel like too much of a betrayal.

Ooh, meant to say - one problem I'd not expected but have had to deal with in a big way has been aggression. It turns out that even though I've barely smoked in the daytime for the last two years, the nicotine I've managed to cram in of an evening has been doing a fine job of suppressing a lot of antisness I never knew I possessed.

At work on Wednesday I punched my PC keyboard so hard in frustration at its (admittedly absolutely unbelievably shit) slowness that it actually started squealing at full volume till I forced a reboot. I was screaming at the monitor and the whole office was apparently staring at me with a mixture of concern and annoyance.

I've been snapping at all and sundry as well - and for the last two years I've prided myself on my relatively calm, Zen demeanour! Surely cigarettes can't have been switching off that much of my emotions? And I thought it was the therapy!