Yes it kills you. Yep, it’s bloody expensive and lulls you into a fall sense of unbridled satisfaction. It smells, it lingers, it stains. But it’s our/their/your right. Pity Scotland and her happy smokers, for today marks the beginning of the end.

I know it’s wrong. In fact, me and a mate were accosted by an elderly drunked in the pub the on Friday who had, after 50 years of puffing, finally given up. Well done that man. I usually resent the preaching of recently-quit smokers, but his insistence was too pressing. Much of his ramblings were incomprehensible, no doubt fuelled by another equally wonderful poison, but he did make one useful observation: smoking is the biggest con around. It is. And we’re all the more pathetic for it. However ridiculous as it sounds – and I tell my brother this on an almost weekly basis – we enjoy it!

As I lit up another one, and supped on my beer in a remarkably cheap pub which does beer for £2.80, it got me thinking. 2006 will be the year I quit – it will – but nevertheless, I despise the nanny state and dictatorship we live in. Maybe the government are covering their arses for the eventual influx of law suits (“no one told me it would kill me!”) from society’s gluttonous creatures. Nevertheless, it makes me angry that someone in government can tell us – law-abiding, polite, hard-working tax-payers – not to smoke.

Oh, and by the way, the bars housed on the Thames in Parliament are exempt from the upcoming ban on smoking; those very same minions will happily puff on their cigarettes while the rest of us suffer in the stupifaction of better health and a nicotineless existence.

Yes it’s bad, but it’s also our choice. Meanwhile, Jacques Kallis has just hit his 24th hundred (vain attempt to make this rant related to cricket, which it clearly aint)

Apologies, shan’t rant about non-cricket matters here again.