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Brian Walters, political editor of the South Wales Evening Post, has been smoking for more than 44 years.

Now he has decided to quit the habit – and is hoping readers will be able to help him by donating to a good cause.

Here is his heartfelt appeal, which first appeared in the Post…

I am appealing for help to break the habit of a lifetime. Not quite a lifetime, perhaps, but 44 years is a long time to be hooked on smoking.

My mother and father smoked – it was fashionable to do so in those days – and I remember I was nine when I pinched one of their Craven A cigarettes and took my first, fateful puff. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now, 44 years on, I have decided that a really determined effort to kick the evil habit is long overdue, and I have set myself three months in which to do so.

It is going to take a monumental effort, for I estimate that I have smoked 518,000 cigarettes which have cost me, at today’s prices, more than £100,000.

Think what I could have spent that money on! However, the chief motivation is health, or, in my present state, the lack of it.

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