I’ve had a great affection for smokers, they’re so faithful. Tobacco companies have lied to them for decades, spiked products to make them more addictive, manipulated research, danced around compensation suits until plaintiffs have died of illnesses, even insulted tobacco users in confidential mailings and still they keep on buying.

Smokers don’t care how environmentally damaging Big Tobacco’s production methods are, or how many dodgy political connections they have. On March 26 I was especially gentle around our Scottish puffers in enclosed public places because they might well be tetchy, what with the start of the UK’s first smoking ban. Smoking is one of the two vices I’ve never found attractive (the other is gambling). Smoking always seemed to involve a great deal of phlegm. Frankly, demanding a packet of Marlboro Lights would be so dull and abstemious that many of us writers would think it beneath us. We like our self-destruction to be an affront to God and man. But, ghastly excesses apart, writing is a solitary craft, conducted far from smoking bans. Stand-up comedy hopes to be conducted in a crowd and my small experience of gigs has taught me that the sweaty pall of fag smoke front of house is nothing compared to the blinding fog backstage generated by tense individuals who are often chain-smoking with both hands and feet.

Tobacco companies are lobbying to get more smoking into movies but I’m not sure if an extra in a community theatre production of An Inspector Calls is going to contaminate a generation’s habits by lighting up a fake filter tip and, as everyone knows, “stage’’ cigarettes smell of burning horse manure and old men and may deter smokers.

Without cigarettes, it’s unclear how unhinged Scottish comedy may get. I expect that the next green room I stumble into will be full of wretched figures driven to licking toads, or each other, for comfort. We’re all aware that the comedian and smoker Bill Hicks died of cancer, leaving us to muse that if a politically involved Texan was going to get the Big Sleep we might have chosen that other guy, the one who chokes on pretzels. I’m in favour of many comedians living a long time. And I’m tired of going to smokers’ funerals.