WHEN IT COMES to cigarettes, the prospect of stepping across death's threshold with lungs shot full of potholes does offer a fair element of discouragement. But I find the idea of paying $6.21 per pack for the things a far more potent deterrent.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a confirmed smoker and always will be. It's just that I don't smoke.

I prefer living in a cottage in a small English village and breathing in sulfur fumes from damp coal in the fireplace, and methane-laden cow farts and tractor fumes and the aroma of rotting fuchsias and tulips. And the financial reality is that I cannot afford these little pleasures and cigarettes, too.

Pity, that, because my wife Elizabeth and I are freshly returned from an English countryside day out in which we stumbled on a major new airport, somehow linked up with an army of trucks that looked like a scene out of the movie "Convoy," discovered three villages thought to have vanished in the Middle Ages and ran into a heavy snowstorm on a motorway at evening rush hour.

This 99-mile soiree took 3 1/2 hours. Elizabeth, remarkably perceptive as she is, dubbed it "the Journey from Hell" before announcing in her next plaintive breath, "I badly need a cigarette." And me: "I'll have a couple, or 30 . . . make that a couple of packs."

These are such occasions as cigarettes were invented for, or if they weren't, they should have been. But Elizabeth, too, is a non-smoking confirmed smoker.

And there is the matter of the $9,067. That's the difference between life in a cottage with a roaring fire in the fireplace, or sitting in last year's rags in the great outdoors, cooking soup in a used tomato can over an open fire for ourselves and three scrawny cats - with the only other warmth from the cigarettes we'd dangle happily from our cracked lips.

Let's go back a few years - well, okay, maybe a few decades - to my college days at Duke University. Duke is in Durham, NC, and North Carolina is tobacco country. The tobacco companies didn't miss this opportunity to recruit a young clientele, and we Dukies never had to fork out a penny for cigarettes.

In other words, I became a cigarette fiend absolutely free of charge, and you don't get that kind of deal very often these days. Even when I turned professional and started having to pay for the things, it didn't amount to much because this was, well, still mostly in North Carolina.

During my years in Vietnam as a war correspondent, between bullets and bombs you could puff away on the freebie cigarettes the U.S. government tucked into your C-ration packets to keep your mind off the ham and lima beans and other culinary catastrophes it had managed to stuff into cans.

Even when you could get out of the jungles and swamps and rice paddies long enough to drop by a PX, cigarettes were still only 14 cents a pack. At that price, I felt I couldn't afford not to smoke. Nor did I wish to offend a good-buddy government obviously thinking of the damage to my wallet, if not to my health.

Now it's true that by this time the U.S. Surgeon General had kicked up a bit of a fuss about cigarettes being a health hazard, but that was easily enough ignored. He said cigarettes were harmful to living tissue, right? Cancers are composed of living tissue, right?

Think about it.

It was only when I arrived in London that I became aware of the damage that smoking could do, initially to one's pocketbook and latterly to one's well-being.

When it comes to tobacco, the British government is rather less beneficent than the folks in Washington, viewing the weed as it does as a cash cow with leaves.

Every time it needs a few extra billion to pay for four-star hotels for illegal immigrants from Kosovo or to prosecute a grocer for selling bananas by the pound instead of by Frenchie kilograms or to pay a hundred grand to a teacher offended by an Irish joke, London tacks a few more pennies on a packet of ciggies.

I was up to three packs a day - and Elizabeth was getting through one on her own - by the time I realized the surgeon general was serious about the health risk and I found myself in a hospital, awaiting triple by-pass surgery to replace the heart vessels damaged by several decades of cut-price smoking.

That was a stroke of very good fortune, although I didn't rightly see it as such at the time.

The night before the operation, I asked Elizabeth to bring me a pack of cigarettes. That she did, and in the hour between 8 p.m. and "lights out" at 9, I smoked all 20 of them. My mouth wound up tasting like the Devil's own latrine, but they were the last cigarettes I ever had, and that was 10 years ago.

Now I don't recommend this procedure to would-be non-smokers, particularly those of the bare-chested he-man persuasion. My ribs are now connected by strands of steel wire and my chest still bears a scar by what looks like a botched attempt to install a zipper from my collar bone halfway to my navel.

But it worked for me and, indirectly, for Elizabeth. About a week after my surgery, she smoked her last. In the years since, we've devoted our efforts to getting out of London and into our cottage (our mortgage was approved about the time the surgeon was telling me in great, gory detail about my upcoming heart operation).

I don't pay much attention to the cost of cigarettes these days. I did today. A front-page story in The Daily Mail allowed as how a pack of the things now sells for $6.21.

At three packs a day - my rate when I quit - that's $6,800 a year for cigarettes, plus another $2,267 for Elizabeth. A grand total of $9,067 annually (or $9,091 in leap years).

So it would have been the cigarettes or the cottage. Happily, we opted for cow farts.

Thought for the Day: Always remember you are unique, just like everyone else.

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