A few times S. had asked asked me to help him to quit. Then he told me off for not organizing it. Then I said, well, you need to do it. I looked into it, thought about it and the thing is, you yourself need to quit. There is not much I can do about it. So he got angry for not helping him.
Then there was a vague decision to stop smoking in November. Perhaps in December. No, after the holidays. So January, is it?
That was when he said, alright, let's do it, whenever, just give me some notice. (I have written about this a bit in the previous post). So I did. I gave him notice. I said we would go to Hungary for a long weekend as planned and when we come back to London, that is the time to quit. He said, alright. Then, I presume he had forgotten all about this.
There had been a few other occasions when he had tried to quit in the past, but then each time (it was anything from a few days to about a week) a friend came to stay with us in London or we would stay with friends or we would come to Hungary to see friends. He would always (straight away and totally honestly) say, okay, you know I am now going to smoke, you know - with an expression on his face which was a mixture of "what else could I do but light up when everyone else is doing this", "sorry about that", and "it must be like this, and you need to accept it". So I have. So I did.
As all of his close friends smoke, and they smoke heavily too, I realized after a while that the only way he would ever quit was to go on one of our trips to Budapest (much of our family and friends live there) and when we come back to London, that will be day one of quitting smoking.
So I decided several weeks ago that the grand hassle is going to start when we come back to London this time.
Here is what happened.
As said before I decided to make something fun out of it. If it is going to be hard, which it definitely will be, why not at least put energy and creativity in it and have some fun. And planning thoughtful surprises, this is very my strength lies. A few gifts. Perhaps games. A few clues. Sometimes just something to do. Just to help him get through the day. Get through the hour.
Firstly, I sent him 2 letters but addressed to his Dad's Budapest address. One contained a plain A4 sheet with one QR code on it. I have recently learned (from S., actually) that QR codes are very easy to create and are a lot of fun to play with. You can easily create QR codes from plain text or URLs, then download the QR code as an image. Then you can do with it as you please. Here is one QR code generator that I used. Slight setback was that it doesn't do Hungarian characters. Alright it does, but they look more like Chinese characters. So I was better off using the English alphabet, even though part of my message was in Hungarian.
When viewed through a smart phone, the 1st letter revealed a contract. It was in both English and Hungarian.
The contract stated that
1. the quitting begins on February 4th,
2. I will help S. With everything.
3. S. needs to make a very difficult decision.
And then at the end a declaration:
I hereby declare: I am going to quit smoking on February 4th, 2013.
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
The 2. letter had the same text as the QR code, but it was the actual contract on the A4, signed by me, awaiting S.'s signature.
Last minute, right before he received the letters, I had a brilliant idea for myself. I prepared myself for total failure. Perhaps he won't sign it. He might reject it. He is a very strong man, someone who keeps his word. But will he make this promise? Will he want to go through with this at all?
I am still not sure how this will play out. Wish me luck.
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