When the world is your ashtray

This morning, on the way to a meeting with a client, I found myself behind a CitiGolf (Volkswagen drivers … I tell you) the colour of a swimming pool after it has been left an entire summer without the addition of HTH. I didn’t pay too much attention to it; just another car in the traffic when there were other things to think about, like which route I should take and why John Robbie has such a high-pitched voice. Then I noticed that a small pale object landed on the tarmac and sighed a faint plume of smoke, and I paid more attention. The driver of the car was a woman with a blonde ponytail — young, I assumed.

“Filthy little cow,” I thought to myself, noting that the car carried CA plates. “Thinks she can use the world as her ashtray.”

It is frightfully unoriginal, I know, to rant about cigarettes and smoking. I’ve done it often enough before. But every now and then, I have to let off steam. So here, briefly, are a couple of things that really irritate me about smokers right now:

1. Smokers in lifts. The smell of smoke clings to their clothing and leaks from their skin, filling the entire small space until you’re about to heave. I don’t even have to physically share a lift with a smoker to feel ill — often the malevolent odour remains long after they have left. Similarly,

2. Smokers in boardrooms, especially boardrooms with inadequate ventilation. After a so-called “body break”, where people rush out to get their fix, the miasma of tobacco in the room is palpable.

3. Wading through a pall of smoke as you walk into a building because all the nicotine addicts are huddled outside the entrance.

4. Cigarette butts in potplants, gardens, on traffic islands, in drains, on pavements, everywhere. The incontinence of smokers who regard the world as a suitable receptacle for the fag ends of their filthy habit is something that offends me on an utterly profound level. Smokers who casually flick their butts out into the world should be shot at dawn, without exception.

5. Having to socialise at a function where smokers are present and emerging reeking yourself. I’ve aired out jackets for a week and still not been able to get rid of the whiff of heart disease and emphysema.

6. Smoke breaks. I am mystified why smoke breaks as a category are not included in time sheet codes. They should be; they take enough of people’s time.

7. Smoker’s cough. One of the foulest sounds known to man, more torturous than car alarms and yapping dachshunds and Die Campbells.

Feel free to add to the list. You’ll feel better, smokers will feel a little more stigmatised as a result of their horrible habit and (we hope) be more motivated to quit, and the world will be a better place.