In the first week of No Smoking Britain, the right of someone to sit somewhere of their own choice and not risk being given cancer seems a reasonable one.
I don't think it's fair, especially where staff and smokers in an establishment agree they all want to light up, but it will cut down smoking. I can live with it, though it was good to see that David Hockney went mental on telly about it the other day.
What is interesting is the 20 year anniversary of Chernobyl in a few weeks time. I remember the day Chernobyl kicked off. I was holidaying with my first girlfriend, and we were heading to the beach when news of the disaster came over the car radio.
It was a sunny day, but with a cold northerly blustering wind that was, the radio assured us, coming directly across the north sea from the disaster area.
We just said 'shit' in the car and went quiet, but the freedom of the beach meant when we arrived we laughed about the world ending, and about the poison we were breathing in, how this could all be it.
It felt new to think the world was going to end. A bit sad, but too surreal to get grumpy about.
Then we sat in the sun and looked out at the sea, holding hands. I could do that kind of thing back then without having an argument.
Later there was acid rain in the UK, and sheep in the north east were found with unacceptable levels of radiation in their bodies from nuclear-infected fields.
Estimates are that about 4,000 Russians got cancer directly from the blast, and how many residual thousands from all over Europe that got a tumour that was sparked by a side order of Chernobyl radiation will never really be known.
They are throwing too much other stuff at us to tell. Plus there's the fags.
Anyway, so now they're looking at nuclear power again, yet the smoking argument seems to go out the window. Nuclear power plants give you cancer. Ask anyone who lives near Sellafield in the UK, and the tumour cases in the region.
But unlike cigarettes, reactors won't be banned and only allowed inside the homes of those who want them.
As someone who doesn't want cancer from nuclear power, or radiated sheep, or acid rain, I can't decide to move to another room, or ban pro nuclear arseholes from going out and enjoying themselves while people die from their ignorance.
And finally, I'm more worried if Iran is building a nuclear power plant than a bomb... yesterday's earthquake wasn't the first to hit the country which is set across a fault that crunches a piece of the Iran virtually every year.
With the right placement, Iran might manage to wipe out Israel, Iraq, Itself and the rest of us with a power plant if the earthquake decides to strike and send the reactor heading for the earth's core.
So come on anti-smokers, your busy-body work is done here. No more coughy coughy in the pub. Sweet smelling coffee will be the only after-dinner restaurant aroma. You've won. It's over.
Now take your self-righteous pompous attitude and do something useful with it.
