Kerre Woodham: The anti-smoking message is starting to filter through

So how are you smokers doing? Have you managed to find a small out-of-the-way pocket of the back yard that you can call your own where you can indulge in your habit without incurring fines, social opprobrium and the wrath of the righteous?

Have you decided to succumb to the worldwide movement to rid the planet of smokers and give the habit away?

Or have you decided that you will never, ever cede to the fundamentalist healthniks and you'll continue to smoke until your last breath? Which, if the healthniks are to be believed, will come sooner rather than later.

I do feel sorry for smokers. I'm not one myself, although I used to dabble. But the fags were really there as props for my drinking.

While gesticulating wildly in the middle of a rambling story, the point was more effectively made if I stabbed the air with a cigarette. I never, ever smoked in the morning - unless the morning happened to run on from the night, if you know what I mean.

I never, ever smoked menthols - actually, that would have been one way for the government to get everybody to quit smoking without resorting to legislation. Just ban the sale of all cigarettes except menthols. Overnight, all but the freaky .05 per cent of the population that actually likes menthols would have given up. I used to love the odd cigar and although I never smoked a pipe myself, I love snuffling around those that do. There's something rich and resonant about pipe smokers.

But within a generation, I'm picking smokers will be consigned to history just like every other anachronistic group that passed this way - unionists, Rob's Mob, the Bring Back Buck brigade, and smokers. Once a force to be reckoned with, they are now, or soon will be, footnotes in the pages of history. R. I. P.