“GIVING up smoking is easy,” Mark Twain said. “I've done it hundreds of times.” In my case, make that thousands of times - usually last thing at night when resolutions spring bravely to mind, then dissolve in sleep and die with that first blissful drag of the morning.

Like many smokers of my generation, I have reread the late Allen Carr's seminal The Easy Way to Stop Smoking several times. And like all puffers, newly addicted or veteran, I have plenty of reasons to stop. Top of my list would be:

1. I am a parent. Our daughter Amy is 11, and keeps asking me to quit.

2. I have been smoking for 30 years, which puts me at risk of several dreadful medical conditions, including lung cancer.

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3. I had a heart attack two years ago, after which a stent was fitted to a coronary artery.

4. I suffer periodically from agonising cluster headaches that are probably made worse by smoking (many sufferers are, or were, heavy smokers).

The trouble is that, pace Twain and Carr, giving up smoking is far from easy. Yet surely there must be some way to minimise the pain?

It is this thought that brings me to the Royal Yacht Hotel in St Helier, Jersey, to be guided (hopefully) into a smoke-free future by the life coach Bryce Alford, who uses a mixture of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), hypnosis and “emotional freedom techniques” to help people to stop smoking or achieve other daunting goals, such as losing weight and tackling phobias.

His “I Quit” package at the Royal Yacht involves three hour-long therapy sessions over three days; usually a long weekend.

Alford is lean, superfit (he ran a half-marathon before our first session) and dressed in chinos and a pale orange sweater.

His voice is amiable and his manner relaxed, but the gaze behind is intense: Alford is serious about his life-changing vocation and believes in maintaining eye contact, which, as an habitual gaze-avoider, I find discomfiting at first.

His clients are e-mailed a detailed pre-course questionnaire on their smoking habits and history, so Alford already knows that I started smoking at 16, puff through at least 20 cigarettes a day and have managed to give up just twice: once for 15 months at the age of 22, and again for seven weeks after my heart attack.

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