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Smoking is ruined. It’s been over a month since the government reached out and tossed us happy smoke fans into the fierce and gloomy night forever, like Hitler’s bodyguards forced to puff under the falling Soviet ordnance in the bunker’s garden. It is quite possibly the most infuriating edict I have ever had the misfortune to collide with. Smoking is ruined, and so is democracy.

As the French say, I love smoking. It’s fun and pleasant. It increases my social skills and makes me look good. There are, of course, negative aspects to the enterprise: the last cough I had lasted 5 weeks and was very nasty; I can’t run more than a few yards without swearing; I will probably die from it. However, these minor details dissipate rapidly when confronted with one simple fact: I love it.

Cynics will claim that I don’t love it, that I am merely addicted. I encourage these characters to take up smoking and then to try to discern the difference between addiction and enjoyment. There is no difference. All nice things are addictive. They are addictive because they’re nice.

Where did the stupid idea come from? Do you remember any angry, voracious campaigning for a blanket ban in the years preceding? I don’t. I don’t because there wasn’t any. It seems to have been banned on some mysterious whim, ignited and then pushed through by some ugly and misguided utilitarian conscience.

The dreadful result? My ilk and me ostracised to the freezing air and wet benches of ‘summery’ England, adding pneumonia and exposure to the list of grotty maladies we can already expect.

‘It’s your own fault,’ scoff the non-smoking puritans, ‘at least now we don’t have to breathe your filth,’ and I agree that they have a valid point. But when did anyone say they had to breathe our fumes? It’s always been your own choice if you go and sit in a smoke-filled bar, just as it is now my own choice to stay away from those sanitised monstrosities.

We have transferred overnight from smoking everywhere to smoking nowhere, in one culture-rupturing act of bureaucratic insanity. Was is that hard, would anyone have complained, would there have been chaos if the government had offered the country’s drinking establishments the choice to ban smoking (as some already had); had given smoke-free premises financial incentives in the interests of public health? Then all the non-smokers could have congregated in their shiny, fresh bars and all us scum could’ve gathered in our dirt holes. Of course, there would have been loads of non-smokers in the smoke zones because, as everyone knows, smokers are sexier and have more fun, but that would have been democratic, wouldn’t it?

Ha! Democratic it may have been, but the idea that pub and club owners might’ve been adult and smart enough to make decisions on the running of their own premises is absurd. After all, smoking has only been an integral part of the fabric of British life for 400 years, far better that the likes of Patricia Hewitt make the decision than Pedro Smith of the Fiddle & Cliché.

What the current government and social engineers are trying to do, like all the dreary and dangerous ideologues before them, is to speed up human evolution. No one smokes in Star Trek, or eats like a pig, or sleeps in late, or masturbates. In the future it is quite possible that we will all be healthy and good, but at this present time we are still an excessive and hedonistic bunch, some of us thoroughly enjoying the various states of ‘corruption’ this world has to offer.

I didn’t used to go into non-smoking restaurants or bars because I couldn’t smoke in them. Now there is NOWHERE for me to go, not even the grottiest and most unfriendly taverns in the land, full of drug-deals, alcoholism, gambling and violence as they are…but no tobacco smoke.

This nonsense could very well be the end of me. I may have to move to another country. I may have to take up law and groom the statutes for possible loopholes. I may even have to give up smoking, though that truly is the cyanide option.

Smoking is dead. RIP