I remember smoking in class at college. When one particularly fussy lecturer objected, I kindly offered to move to the rear of the hall so as not to disturb him (he was not mollified).

In the early '70s, when I arrived in Hong Kong, I was still smoking. It was pretty common. You could smoke on the upper deck of buses, for example. Planes had smoking and non-smoking sections of seating. Some top-end restaurants were just starting to introduce the idea of non-smoking sections, but enforcement was pretty casual. One of the first stories I wrote for the newspaper, which earned me a byline on the front page, was when I reported that smoking would not be allowed on the future mass transit railway ("Tube Shock: No Smoking").

But in August 1977 I made one of the best decisions of my life, certainly the one with the biggest impact on my overall health, and stopped smoking - cold turkey. Not because my then wife objected, not because I had become more health conscious, but because someone who could not speak "told" me something. My firstborn son, then six months old, awoke in his cot one morning with what was quite clearly a smoker's cough. I couldn't handle the guilt, simple as that.

Stopping smoking led to my putting on weight, which led to gym membership and playing squash, which further improved my health. So one virtue led to another.

By now you might be wondering what the connection is between smoking and "Page 3" girls. Simple. The used to have a "Page 3" girl too, and one of my first jobs was to write the caption. Ours was more modest, as the women wore both the top and bottom of their bikinis.

I was never a fan of the topless variety because they always seemed to make a big thing about size, and my tastes in this area - how shall I put this delicately - tend to favour quality over quantity. But to each his own.

I do not miss smoking, and hardly anyone I know still smokes. But I would have a twinge of nostalgia if we lost the "Page 3" girls. How else could trainee journalists start their careers?