Smokers in western societies have a haunted look about them. The minute they light up, people - and I'm one of them - look disgusted, cover their noses to avoid the smell and ask to be moved to another table if they happen to be seated next to them at a restaurant.
Why anyone bothers paying good money for fine dining and then smokes is beyond me. People who smoke don't have as effective taste and smell senses as non-smokers.
And they can hardly be impressing their guests by shrouding all those dishes with a pall of foul-smelling smoke.
But this is actually a poorly disguised sympathy column for smokers. They deserve our sympathy for being addicts. And many of them were tricked into it by effective marketing from sophisticated corporations who know how to ensnare their victims when they are most vulnerable - when they are young and image-conscious.
You would think being smelly, unwanted by the rest of society and heading for an early, painful and unglamorous death wouldn't appeal to the image-conscious. But to plenty of teenagers breaking social rules, harming your body, even aiming for death, is still 'cool'. And the tobacco companies know it.
Added to that, they don't mind girls knowing that reducing your sense of taste makes eating much less of a pleasure so the anorexia-minded among our teenagers think it is a weight-loss treatment.
They should see some of the female smokers I have seen in the mortuary. By the time they come to this, they've learned to overeat, despite, or perhaps because of, not tasting their food. Their arteries are clogged with fat and their lungs and hearts have failed. It is not a pretty sight. Whoever still manages to persuade girls that smoking is a glamorous beauty aid is a marketing genius.
