I abhor smoking.  As a child I was bathed in smoke.    My parents smoked.  Incessantly.  They had ashtrays by their bed. In the morning a cigarette often came before  a restorative cup of tea.  As we watched television - we did it as a family then as, like most, we had only one telly - wreaths of blue smoke insidiously enveloped us children.  I attribute to my smoke-filled early life a weakness of chest which can still on occasion trigger mild but nonetheless debilitating asthma attacks - thankfully now  only a few times year.

As I set off on my journalistic career most newsroom colleagues would light up regularly.  Smoking and alcohol went together.  Every BBC premises had a so-called “BBC Club” - a euphemism for Staff Bar.  One editor I worked under would sink several pints at lunchtime and then bring up half a dozen more to down in the stressful run up to our six o’clock new programme, while chain smoking endless cigarettes.

Surrounded as I was by such role models, naturally I had to try tobacco, if only  to fit in.  I hated cigarettes.  I just didn’t like the taste. Thankfully.  I dallied with a pipe for a while.  As a craven teenager I thought it looked cool.  I loved the theatre of opening a tin of Balkan Sobranie, rubbing the tobacco to release its seductive aroma, stuffing it into the pipe and tamping it down, then lighting up with a Swan Vesta.  Like coffee, it smelled better than it tasted.  I believed it would make me more attractive to the opposite sex.  I am not sure it did; anyway, I didn’t have the nerve to canvas female opinion.  What I soon found out was that a pipe played havoc with my clothes.  Pinhole burns appeared in shirts and trousers.  The pipe had to go.

(Image: Burlison Photography)

From then on, my smoking was merely passive.  I say merely; many was the time that after a newsroom shift when we repaired to the pub for an inevitable pint or three, I found my eyes watering.  Lord knows what the smoke was doing to my lungs.  Thankfully, I haven’t suffered like the late, great Roy Castle who, having never smoked, is thought to have contracted lung cancer from passive smoking in the night clubs where he played his trumpet.  A nice man taken far too early.

My father was very keen on his hookah or hubble-bubble pipe.  He thought it safer as the smoke was cooled and filtered as it bubbled through the water in the base of the pipe.  Sadly, it didn’t work that well. He died of a heart attack at 46.  No doubt his arteries had narrowed prematurely.  My mother, despite being on 60 fags a day, lasted until 79 but the last ten years of her life were marred by debilitating COPD.

When the smoking ban was brought in in 2007, I welcomed it.  Overnight pubs became a joy to be in.  Of course, one felt sorry for the smokers banished to the freezing cold to indulge their guilty pleasure, but pleased they weren’t imposing their habit on others.  Walking around London the winds swirling around office skyscrapers would stir up eddies of fag ends in the spots where smokers gathered for a ciggy break – much to the chagrin of their colleagues who had to cover for them during the 20 minutes it took for them to descend from their high-rise office, get their hit of nicotine, and then return to their desks.

So you think I would be in favour of the latest moves to restrict even more where smokers can light up.  I am not.  Smoking is dying out naturally anyway.  Travel abroad and you can see how far Britain has come on its smoke free journey.  Smokers are now a minority, and our country proudly protects minorities.  Lay off the smokers!