Smoking - is it good for you ?

Well thats set 'cat among pigeons hasn't it ?

The House of Commons vote to ban smoking in all public and private licensed premises that is.

I'll declare right now that I don't smoke, never have done, may have had a puff on a few ciggies as a feckless youth, and there's a photograph of me somewhere as a pissed up 18 year old enjoying a cigar outside a pub, but apart from that I class myself as a non-smoker.

But thats not to say that I'm anti-smoking.

I hate the smell of stale smoke on your clothes the morning after a night out in a pub, but I suspect that (if they had a sense of smell, which most of them don't) even smokers actually hate the smell the morning after, but I do enjoy the smell of fresh tobacco smoke especially in a pub, its a part of the pub atmosphere, maybe I'm addicted ?

Other tobacco smells can be so evocotive too, a pipe for instance will always remind me of my first job where my boss always had a pipe on the go, all day long, most afternoons you couldn't see into his office at all and the only way to find out if he was still in there was to check to see if his car was still parked outside.

Cigars do the same thing, they remind me of the golf club that my dad used to be a member of, most of the blokes there would light one up in the mens bar when they'd finished a round of golf, I think they sold more cigars than cigarettes inthere, and it was never an unpleasant smell.

What I didn't like, and have never understood, is the all-consuming addiction to cigarettes that some people have. When I was 20-something I worked all over the country for my company and for six months or so was based in Birmingham where they found me lodgings with a lady in accounts.

She and her relationship with her husband and his mistress deserve a blog all on their own, but the main point here is that they were both chain smokers, and when I say chain smokers I mean that they were never seen during their waking moments without a cigarette on the go.

Their house fekking stank, they fekkin stank, and because I stayed there then I fekkin stank, of old stale cigarette smoke and it was not very pleasant. Everything in their house was brown, everything that she put on the table tasted of cigarettes everywhere you turned, every room in the house had an ashtray and a spare lighter, even in the bathroom, they were nice people but I was glad to move on, after I'd broken their glass dining table, but thats another story.

Of course the most ironic thing about the whole vote to ban public use of cigarettes is the fact that the bar in the House of Commons will not be included in the legislation, its classed as a Royal Palace and apparently the rules do not apply to royal palaces, which makes me wonder which other rules do not apply in royal palaces, can the Queen do literally anything in her palaces and if so then why doesn't she make the tabloids more often with tales of outrageous behaviour ?