Have you heard what “they” are suggesting? “They” have posited that smokers should have to apply for a £10 smoking licence - complete with an annual form to fill in, and photo ID.

“Seventy per cent of smokers want to give up,” says Professor Julian Le Grand, of the Government's advisory body Health England. “So if you even make it that little bit more difficult for them to restart, or even start in the first place, it will make a big difference.”

Aside from that fact that the name “Professor Julian Le Grand” sounds like the kind of name someone chippy on the Daily Star would make up to foment class resentment - Le Grand presumably works in a gold-plated office alongside “Lady Jocasta Fancy-Wais” and “Chief Medical Officer Timothy “Rah Rah” Smash-The-Oiks” - the prof has a point. The number of people smoking in this country is, quite clearly, linked to how easy it is to buy and subsequently smoke fags. When every single tobacco plant in the world was in America, being smoked by the Algonquin, Blackfoot and Cree, absolutely no one in Britain was addicted to cigarettes. That's just a fact.

Clearly we can't return to that point again. But it's obvious that the fewer opportunities you have to smoke, the less you will smoke. When I started smoking, in the early Nineties, you could smoke on buses, in hospitals, in school common-rooms and, practically, in a buggy next to an asthmatic child. They'd only just phased it out on the Tube, after the King's Cross fire. It was actually easier to smoke than to not smoke. It certainly took less time to take a proffered fag than to explain that, actually, you'd heard this rumour up from Big London that fags might be bad for you, and could lead to dandruff, or coughs.

These days, of course, you can't even smoke in a pub or club. And given our latitude, this means that the majority of fags being smoked in Britain are being done so by people standing outside, their heads being seared by a patio heater while their ankles succumb to rain, blown newspapers and the Gateshead equivalent of the mistral. Not surprisingly, since the pub ban took effect, smoking figures have dropped by 16 per cent. For those of us who started smoking to look like James Dean, it's kind of hard to reconcile that desire with standing in the doorway of Bella Pasta in February, being shouted at by crack-tramps.

I like the idea of a smoking licence, because I am spineless, weak and in denial. Although I gave up my 40-a-day habit long before I had children, I still succumb to what I think of, joyfully, as “party fags” - ie, fags proffered when I'm drunk, by someone I like or admire, as a prelude to slagging someone off or gossiping about them. Unfortunately, given my ultimately shallow existence, this can often mean smoking a pack a night, and waking up the next morning with lungs like two Shredded Wheat filled with death.

The only way for nicotine dilettantes like me - who haven't actually bought a cigarette for more than a decade - to stop smoking is to make those who give us the fags hate us, and start to see us as the spongeing, lightweight liabilities that we really are. The licence would be perfect for this - after all, there's nothing like filling in a self-assessment tax return to make you hate corporate tax-dodgers, and I would imagine that the annual slog of getting a smoking licence would make you feel pretty chippy towards any casual non-licensee “bumming” a “fag”. In this day and age, proper, full-time, addicted smokers have to put so much effort into their habit that all part-time, take-it-or-leave-it smokers should be wholly ashamed of smoking in their presence.

Last month I went with a group of friends to Tower 42 - the bar on the 42nd story of what used to be the NatWest Tower, and is now called something corporate and foreign that slips my mind entirely. As the bar could be a terrorist target, to get to it you have to enter through reception, pass through a metal detector, go up one escalator, then up 40 subsequent storeys in a lift. By the time that you get to the bar, you feel a sense of travel ennui of the sort you would have experienced had you just taken a flight to Berlin.

When, after half an hour of cava and vileness, the two smokers in our group announced that they were “popping out for a fag” - down 42 storeys and through security and reception, just to have a roll-up in a windtunnel alleyway full of bins - I felt truly ashamed that I had previously cadged their baccy. I was like someone taking a junkie's methadone, merely to “unwind” on Friday night in front of Gardener's World.

I felt a similar flush of mortification last week, when a friend who is on 50 a day bounded up to me. He had been talking to an air hostess, it turned out, and she had told him how the air crew have a sneaky smoke on long-haul flights.

“Apparently,” my friend said, his face shining, “you go into the toilets, squat down by the lavvy and balance a 50 pence piece on that weird lavvy-flap in the pan. The coin keeps the flap open, and you smoke your fag by blowing the smoke down the hole!”

So just to recap here: this is a person who is genuinely thrilled at the prospect of throwing money into a toilet that had been in non-stop use for more than 12 hours by 300 people - and then following that money with his head.

You know what? If I were that dedicated to smoking, I would want that official smoker's licence. I wouldn't want anyone doubting the hours or the effort that I was putting in.

No Guns N'Roses, let alone guns

“Become a Volunteer Community Police Officer,” suggests a poster campaign in London. “It's great going out there and working with full-time officers!” Am I alone in feeling unsettled by this recruitment angle? That the best thing about being a VCPO is hanging out with real officers? I mean, that's a pretty emotionally unequal relationship. Dangling that as the main motivational carrot is a bit like, well, asking fans to come hang out with the band. And what are the VCPOs supposed to do? Surely they won't be allowed to do any fun stuff, such as drive really fast over speed bumps while listening to Guns N'Roses'Welcome to the Jungle, scream “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE SCUMBAG BEFORE I BLOW YOUR MOTHERFRACKING HEAD OFF” or “look after” confiscated drugs. All that's left is paperwork, holding the real cops' doughnuts during a raid, saying “Wow, you were awesome, man, you rocked”. Scarcely seems worth it. Not even for the free hat.

Sticks and Frisbees

Just a brief moment in the world of celebrity that I would like to bring to your attention. Last week Kate Bosworth (looks like a stick, putatively an actor, unlikely to destablise your precepts of the human condition; nothing very much to concern yourself with, really) revealed how traumatic had been the ending of her relationship with Orlando Bloom (looks like a stick, putatively an actor, unlikely, etc). “It hit me like a Frisbee,” she said, in an interview reprinted in the Sunday Mirror. Now, did she actually mean a Humvee (the gigantic armoured tank-cars beloved of Arnold Schwarzenegger)? Or does language mean so little to her that one word - “Humvee”, say - is pretty much interchangeable with another - “Frisbee”, perhaps? Or did she really mean that the ending of her relationship was like being hit by a small, plastic, skimmable plate? Either way, amazing, really.

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