As we were driving to church the other day, I spied a woman puffing on a cigarette as she trudged along the street. Despite the closed windows of the air-conditioned car, my asthmatic old lungs immediately squeezed themselves shut in dismay.

Back in the 1970s, when I worked in a Navy hospital in Halifax, the only one of many messy tasks that I genuinely resented was cleaning ashtrays. I sometimes thought I was the only person in the building who didn't smoke.

Roll the calendar forward some 35 years, and I was writing a weekly history feature for the Canadian Forces newspaper "The Maple Leaf". To accompany a story about the deployment of the first Canadian Army rotation in Korea, I ran a 1950 photo of a young soldier staggering under an enormous rucksack, with a cigarette dangling rakishly from his lower lip. Within two hours of the release of that issue, I received a stern rebuke from the Canadian Forces Health Services Group for "glamorizing" smoking.

That was me told.