Smoke gets up their noses.

And that is the main reason I won’t consider stopping. It’s not just me either, Frank is of the same mind.

Back in the days when people used to jokingly say ‘It’s National No Smoking day, you should try giving that stuff up’, I always responded ‘If I ever stop, it will not be on No Smoking Day. I will not be a mark on anyone’s scorecard.’ These days I have a fat cigar on that day because they aren’t joking any more.

‘Oh but it’s National No Smoking day.’ So? If your friends had a National Jump Off A Cliff day, would you join in with that too? I wouldn’t and I’m not interested in this one either. Go back to your lemming herd and stop bothering me. You do know you can get cancer by talking to me? You didn’t know? Oh dear. Allow me to explain.

Now they have declared October to be National No Smoking MONTH. Pat Nurse is making great progress with the anti-anti campaign, it’s spreading like wildfire all over the blogs. Nannying Tyrants has the badges in all kinds of sizes and I still have some of that magnetic printer paper for making fridge magnets and non-sticky fly-posting things that attach to outdoor steel ashtrays.

A digression (you knew it had to happen and hey, it’s overdue), but has anyone else noticed that the women shown smoking in the ‘you filthy bastards all stink’ adverts are drop-dead gorgeous, while those women standing on platforms saying ‘Be like Me, Be Pure’ all have PhDs in hideous harridanism? I mean, some of them would turn Medusa to stone. So what’s the message here? The pretty girl with the cigarette is ugly while a whining witch who looks like the reason the dinosaurs committed mass suicide is pretty? I don’t know about you, but as a persuasive technique, that’s a double fail with honours. I’m with Smoky Girl every time. Well, as long as it’s dark and she doesn’t have her glasses on.

Where was I? Oh, right. A whole month of no-smoking days. That’s a lot of cigars. I’d better learn to make them, fast.

You know what though? I think it’s a great idea. On No Smoking Day, many, many non-smokers get annoyed at the constant harassment of their smoking pals. The antismokers are few, much fewer than the smokers. In between are most of the population who just don’t give a shit about smoking one way or the other. They don’t do it, maybe they don’t like it in their houses or cars (and that is fair enough) but elsewhere, they either tolerate it or fail to notice it at all. What they cannot fail to notice is a constant barrage of propaganda.

One day a year is a minor irritant. One day of eye-rolling and groaning as yet another misbegotten by-blow crawls from the shallow end of the gene pool to have a go at your smoking mate, well, people put up with it. It’s just one day. Even we smokers have learned to ignore it. Next day, it’s all forgotten.

But a month of it. A whole month. The smokers won’t care. We get this shit every day anyway. The antismokers will be gearing up like Vortigern’s army heading for Rome and they are going to crawl out of every rat-hole and from under every stone for an intense hate-fest for an entire month.

They’ll start small but… a month. A month. They will all, every one of them, show themselves as they really are. Not to smokers, we see them already, but to those non-smokers who don’t care about smoking one way or the other. Their own friends and family are going to have their eyes opened to the kobolt in their midst.

Every move the antismokers make goes wrong. Every attack backfires. Imagine Nelson telling his men ‘Don’t point the cannons out to sea, you idiots, we’ll lose all the expensive cannonballs. Point them into the ship instead’ and there’s the thought process in the antismoker’s head.

They banned tobacco advertising and now provide daily advertising for free. They deny there is any issue with tobacco smuggling which allows the smugglers free rein. They claim smoking is in decline because we aren’t buying it in Tesco any more. They increase the mystique and cool factor of smoking by making it almost contraband. It’s like smoking cannabis, but legal.

Next, plain packs. Kids will move from ‘Oh, he has cigarettes’ to ‘Ooo, what’s that interesting thing?’ in one generation. The antismokers will not see it. They just keep on plugging away and making no difference but charging the idiots in government for it anyway. And the idiots just keep paying.

The tobacco companies are not getting children interested in smoking. ASH and their antismoking drones are. It is now the greatest act of rebellion a teenager can perform. Well done, ASH. Well done, CRUK, Well done, BMA. Well done, government. Well done indeed. You muppets.

I don’t want children to smoke but not for the reasons you’d expect. I don’t care if children turn out lumpy, in fact I’d be happy to see most of them caught in a downpour of anvils and irritated wolverines. No, I am not ‘thinking of the cheeldren’, I am thinking of ASH. What will they do if there are no new smokers? Hey, just imagine, doctors would have to go back to looking for real causes of disease again. CRUK would have to disband as the sole cause of cancer would not exist. And the drones would have to find a new target to hate.

It’s just a dream. The antismokers will keep promoting smoking because if we did all stop, the gravy train would hit the buffers at full speed.

I’m not going to stop. Maybe they’ll make it illegal one day, like all those other drugs nobody takes any more.

The ones nobody asks about at interviews…