When I can smoke in the polling booth, then we’ll talk about your policies.

An interesting conversation with a friend yesterday evening, during a small smoky-drinky at his place. He reacted to the idea of a smoking ban in his home with outrage. “They’ll never get that!”

He lives in a council house. They’ll get him long before they get me.

His thought was that there would be far too much resistance for such a thing to ever be law.

My response? As much as I can remember of it follows:

“They did it in the pubs. And private clubs. They did it in cafes and restaurants and cinemas. They did it on all privately-owned work premises so even if you work in a cigarette factory, you cannot smoke in there. You can work in a sewage plant or an asbestos disposal facility or a radioactive waste storage plant but you can’t smoke in any of them. You can work in a steel foundry or an incineration facility but you can’t light a little tube of leaf in any of them. They did all that and got away with it.

“They did it on buses, trains, taxis and planes. You cannot smoke on a train station or a bus station or a taxi rank or an airport. This town is full of sheltered housing and old people’s homes. Haven’t you noticed those eighty-year-olds smoking outside in the snow? You visit hospitals often (he has a congenital debilitation) – remember how there used to be a smoking room inside, and now you have to leave the grounds? They did all that and got away with it and nobody seemed to mind.

“You live in a council house. They own this house the same way as they own the hospitals and the sheltered housing. You will have to stop smoking in your own house or you will be homeless.

“The government will tell you it’s a good thing and like all those other things, nobody will mind.”

He was a lifelong SNP voter until that conversation. That’s another one who won’t put his X in Oily Al’s box again and he is far from the first I have convinced. Tomorrow I’m going after another. Then another. I hope this will just keep spreading. And no, the other three Borg parties need not smile. You get mentioned too. I can only get to one or two at a time but they will get others. Oh, and that promise of independence? You didn’t mention the EU, Oily Al, and how it means that Scotland is still in the same union as England anyway, it’s just a much bigger union run by a different set of foreigners. Believe me, I mention it, and I have yet to find anyone happy to hear it.

Oily Al is a puffed-up cretin of the first water. He believes in all the crap about second hand smoke even though there has not been a single death in Scotland (nor indeed in the observable universe) caused by this imaginary ague. And that’s even with me actively trying to convince the buggers to death. In fact, I reckon I’ll have been responsible for the psychosomatic death of an antismoker before second hand smoke ever manages it.

The EU is even worse. Aside from now claiming that wine isn’t wine unless it’s EU plonk, they are intending to extend the ban on that harmless alternative tobacco habit (which doesn’t even produce smoke so the antis have no smell to whine about) to the only EU country that allows it. No, you cannot have the safer alternatives. You cannot have choice. You cannot make your own decisions. Every main party thinks you are stupid and must be controlled. If you vote for them, you are.

Well, there’s one bit of good news. Human ingenuity has found a way around the plain packaging nonsense. We’ll simply print our own covers and stick them over the packs. I fancy a skull motif myself. It will help in discussions with smokophobes. Actually, this idea makes me fairly look forward to those plain packs. In fact, even if the plain packs idea does fall foul of a sudden outbreak of thought among the political classes, personalised over-pack stickers is a good idea anyway. How about ‘biohazard’?

I already use a baccy tin, unbranded and therefore with no health warnings. It’s ready for when the revenue men start checking random smokers to see if they have the Portuguese warnings on their packs. There’s no pack at all. Just a tin with loose baccy inside, some finely shredded, some less finely because I can’t get mine cut that thin.

Soon the baccy inside won’t even be imported. It’ll all be homegrown or picked wild.

But I will need to work on the shredding. Or maybe go over to the pipe, because I can cut to pipe-suitable now.

I still have to try rolling a cigar. All I need is a suitable female thigh. I mean, you can’t buck tradition.