Come to think of it, I started smoking properly when I was 11. Tony Saunders, who ran the newsagents where I paid for cigarettes. Five Park Drive tipped me until it was time to go to school.
A few years later, when I got a job in a local rag, the chief reporter chucked me a fag when I walked through the door for the first time, before we were officially introduced. Then he vomited in the wastebasket.
That was my introduction to the Fourth Estate. Welcome to the House Of Fun, old son.
Smoking is not so much encouraged as mandatory for young trainee journalists, along with grubby white mac from Burton, shorthand notebook and Bureau.
Player number 6 is the common currency, one removes the smoking top sweeping from the barber’s floor. But all I can afford is a weekly salary of £8/6s/8d in old money. That’s eight pounds and 33p in Centigrade.
‘Commissioners from the new, intolerant, lemon-sipping Labor Government want to go further and ban smoking altogether, even in pub gardens. Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far.’
Finally, after a couple of inflationary pay up, I passed Peter Stuyvesant Gold, the height of sophistication in 1970, along with a well done rump steak and an Irish coffee or three from the fixed menu at the Berni Inn.
At the age of 18, I became a 60-day person as a basis for negotiations. Then, a year later, I went cold turkey and gave it all up, after realizing that every time I walked my dog ​​I was wheezing like a blind man playing an accordion outside Woolworth’s to supplement my meager war pension.
Haven’t touched a cigarette since, although for a few years I made a point of shooting a small Cohiba every National Smoking Ban Day, just to annoy people who don’t like jokes and righteous people who react to cigarette smoke, even outdoors, with a manic impersonation of a whirling Dervish.
Eventually, I got fed up with that little protest movement. But the libertarian in me continues to fight Labour’s draconian smoking ban.
In 2004, I was presenting a live TV show from the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, the weekend the Irish government imposed its own illiberal ban on tobacco marijuana. As the UK follows suit, predictions of wholesale pub closures have come true – 700-plus in the past year.
I can’t understand why the landlord can’t decide whether or not to allow smoking in the boozer. Leave it to the punters to decide where to drink.
In the US, the original smoking ban only applied to establishments that served food. Pretzels don’t count. Many binned burger bars in favor of hard-drinking, chain-smoking regulars.
My Eureka moment came a few years ago when I went to a pub in the country of Midsommer Murders with my LBC Radio colleague and resident witch doctor Michael Van Straten, the smoking hot ‘health guru’ for England.
There was a roaring wood fire and everyone was burning with both hands. You can’t see the bar for the fug.
I drove home smelling like I had spent the night in a Jacuzzi full of liquid nicotine after grilling a steak on a wood-burning barbeque.
Later I called a mate from mine the morning after the night before in a pub crawl in Soho. He apologized for not picking up the phone earlier.
‘I was in the park, burning my suit,’ he explained.
The days when Sketchley’s dry cleaners couldn’t get rid of the smell of stale cigarettes. So, gradually, despite opposition in the Nanny State, I got around to the idea of ​​smoke-free pubs and restaurants.
Nigel Farage, now leader of Reform UK, enjoyed a cigarette and a glass of Guinness in 2015.
Now, however, commissioners from the new, intolerant, lemon-sipping Labor Government want to go further and ban smoking altogether, even in pub gardens.
Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Well, nothing is more terrifying than the number of nico addicts dwindling in the rain outside pubs and clubs. If there’s one thing that winds me up, it’s drinkers wanting to reserve a chair at the bar when they nip outside for a good ciggy.
And seeing cancer patients dripping in front of hospital doors, like a Benson & Hedges-sponsored picket line, turned my stomach. Why not just cut out the middle man and check into the nearest undertakers?
My only, niggling reservation is that if Labor get away with this, the next step will be to ban smoking altogether, even in your own home.
Then it will be booze, fast food, red meat, chocolate, anything Pixie Balls-Cooper and her sour Left wing harpies disapprove of.
As it happens, I may have to give up 50 years of being a non-smoker and continue my daily Cohiba protest, outside the Department of Health.
I leave you with the wisdom and wisdom of the Singing Postman, Allan Smethurst, who is in a consensual relationship, is talking, with the Manager who makes it appropriate for us to wear it in the first newspaper.
Do you have a light, boy?
