When the revolting news broke that Keir Starmer – whingeing lovechild of Oliver Cromwell and Captain Mainwaring – could be about to ban smoking in parks, public restaurants and beer gardens, I couldn’t help but think elegiacally of my own lifelong love/hate-affair with the pernicious weed, and to nicotine glories past.
I was 13 when I started smoking in earnest and had been impatient to develop the habit long before that. Back then everyone smoked, and they did it everywhere too – on buses, in trains, on the underground and at the cinema. We were a tobacco culture: chat show guests would puff away languidly, the former prime minister Harold Wilson had just stopped rebuffing Robin Day’s questions by firing up his pipe and some houses had tabletop lighters and cut-glass ashtrays to sanctify the habit for their guests.
Back then, society was neatly divided into smokers and non-smokers
Children would be sold candy-cigarettes in facsimiles of the adult packet – ‘Just like Dad’ said one advert – and most of us couldn’t wait to convert those sugary sticks into the real thing.
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