ONCE upon a time, just a few ashtrays ago, I was your typical dyed-in-the-wool hardline junkie of a smoker.

Like thousands of others hooked on a substance that some say is more addictive than heroin, every single waking moment revolved around tobacco.

The perfect union of naked flame and silky shredded leaves - God, it's so sexy don't you know - punctuated my very existence.

Every day had a familiar, unchanging routine... that glorious cigarette in the virgin morning, encouraged by its dusky handmaiden, the cup of steaming black coffee.

Then work, and the first problem encountered destined to be eased by a haze of blue smoke, nicotine meeting the bloodstream like an express train hitting the buffers.

Lunchtime comes, and the best part of a packet is probably little more than ash, stubbed-out crumpled bodies that were once Bensons or Embassy Regal lying strewn about in appropriate receptacles like the dead of some battlefield, twisted, contorted... burned out.

Oh yes, I can wax lyrical about the weed. This was a love affair that never faltered, neither did either of us develop the contempt that familiarity invariably brings.

Well, actually, that's not entirely correct.

For Nicotina probably did start to give up on me first. She had been my constant companion for all those years, and now she was hurting the very thing that gave her reason to exist.

The bitch was making me ill. My chest was not what it should be...

I gave up smoking in February, 1993. Just like that. No, that's a lie. I plotted our parting with all the calculating cunning of the faithless lover that I had become.

Booking a week's holiday, I bought the patches, prepared a programme of manual work, attached something that looked like a teabag to my arm, and began the first day of my smoke-free future.

It was hard work. Many a time, I almost succumbed to the harlot Nicotina's embraces once again. And yes, the worst moments were many and frequent.

For just as nostalgia kicks in when you walk down the country lane that was once so familiar to you both, the philandering smoker is tormented by the association factor.

Making a cup of coffee or tea... after a meal... or with a pint of beer perched perkily on a shiny, polished pub table. Yes, that's when the urge was the greatest.

Such was my self-righteous zeal that I wrote a piece for the Evening News, complete with picture of patched arm, in which I vowed that never again would the Jezebel weed cast her shadow across my life.

And, I'm proud to say that I never broke under the strain. No, not once. And that's why, nearly 12 years later, I can just about say with confidence that my smoking days are well and truly in the past...

Maybe it's just as well. For smokers are now a persecuted group, the victims of those monstrous regiments of wretched meddlers that have declared war on enjoyment in general.

In the present climate of single issue groups exerting pressures that are in no way commensurate to their size, smokers' days were always going to be numbered. Twenty years ago, when the first warnings appeared, the writing was not just on the packets, it was on the wall, too.

Just over a decade ago, smokers were exiled from the factory or office and marooned in a horrible draughty little shed at the back of the building, or to an airless cubicle.

This was the Anglo-Saxon puritan factor at work here, with a subliminal punishment thrown in for good measure.

So. You're a smoker. Go outside in the pouring rain and see if you still want to continue with your revolting habit. Hmmm?

The last few years have seen an escalation in this new puritanism. Very few of these new zealots goose-stepping through our lives seem to understand that the only true test of democracy is the willingness to tolerate something you don't like.

And one of the saddest developments in this area in recent times has been the ban on smoking in Ireland. Who would have ever thought this would have been possible in the land of the craic, that fabled island of dreamy green hills and peat bogs that run darker than the blackest Guinness?

Well, it happened. Now, conversations are presumably put on hold as those desirous of a snout must break off the blarney and nip outside into the ubiquitous Irish rain for a quick drag.

How come this was allowed, Murphy? And there's me, thinking the sons and the daughters of the Emerald Isle were rebels born and bred.

Irish mist must have displaced the aromatic fume of Sweet Aftons, methinks.

Don't gain the wrong impression from these words. I have for long accepted that smoking is bad for you, and that coming home from the pub smelling like a Grimsby kipper is no longer desirable, not even at Dun Subbin.

And no, people should not be force-fed someone else's habit. As someone who is slightly asthmatic, I am only too aware of the nuisance and discomfort that can be caused by tobacco smoke.

But as the clamour grows for us to follow the Irish example, it is important that we think this one out. Yes, we may have to accept that smoking should be regulated, but that doesn't mean to say that draconian laws as witnessed across the water should be imposed on mainland Britain.

There should be a compromise. And as far as public houses are concerned, the best idea I have seen so far - and contributed by an Evening News reader, as it happens - would be to bring back the "smoke" that could once be found in every back street pub.

It is one of life's ironies that we become hot under the collar about smoking in pubs, yet sit back and say nothing as the big breweries create enormous drinking hangars that can accommodate up to a thousand hard-boozing, potentially obnoxious young people.

Smoking should be allowed to survive in what could be its last stand - the great British pub. I might not like cigarette smoke, but I must understand if it pleases others.

So let's preserve just a little bit of live-and-let-live in this increasingly repressed country of ours. Yes, smoking is not good for your health. But it would - on balance - be far more unhealthy if we surrendered something else to the control freakery rife in this country.