How I don't smoke I'll never know. Both my parents smoked heavily (and it did for them both, although in their mid / late 80's) and just about everyone that could be some sort of role model when I was growing up (older friends, attractive girls, film stars, sports people (remember Barry Sheene having a hole drilled in the chin bar of his helmet so he could smoke on the start line), they all smoked. You couldn't get on a bus or a train without inhaling second hand smoke and there was a unofficial cigarette currency running alongside real money at school.

So why am I not wheezing my way up stairs and forgetting people's names these days (like a work friend five years younger than me who has smoked a pipe all his life). Well partly it's because I was perverse enough to not want to do what everyone else did, partly it's because I didn't want to be shackled to being forced to have to buy the things (ok if I could pick and choose when but not if I was forced to by addiction), but mainly due to the effect of one of the shock horror early anti smoking tv programmes which compared the autopsy state of a smokers lungs with a non smokers. At twelve there was no way I wanted to end up with the black tar ridden ones.

So I've never smoked and these days, other than the person mentioned above, I don't know many who do. Because smoking was so common when I was growing up I have no prejudice against people who smoke now but privately think it a shortsighted thing to do.

The government's stance has always been very two faced; disapproving on health grounds but not enough to forego the tax revenue it raises although I admit there are issues of personal liberty in there, particularly when it involves something like tobacco with addictive qualities that many would be unable to give up overnight. Perhaps the softly softly, chip away at the edges (and keep voting for us) approach was about as much as they could do. As for the health service, well maybe that's for another post.