It's No Smoking Day (yawn).
This used to be the busiest day, media wise, in the Forest year. In those pre-Internet years the work would begin weeks in advance with media packs being prepared and posted to journalists and broadcasters throughout the country.
Our message was simple: we had no objection to the concept of No Smoking Day (one day in the year when people who wish to quit can focus on that objective) but we objected to the fact that companies and organisations were being encouraged to use NSD as a platform for some cheap publicity, usually in the guise of smoking bans or other anti-smoking initiatives that targeted all smokers, not just those who wanted to cut down or quit.
When I began working for Forest I had the idea of organising a No Smoking Day stunt that would offer some light relief from all the stop smoking hyperbole.
I decided it was best if we left the country on No Smoking Day and so we organised an away day to Paris, the "European capital of smoking" (as it was then), where we met our French counterparts who hosted lunch in a restaurant formally used by the Resistance during the war.
The group went via Eurostar, which still had smoking coaches in 1999, and the trip was given a double page spread in one newspaper which sent its main feature writer and a photographer. Happy days!
The next year we organised a smoker-friendly breakfast fry-up at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, the famous London restaurant. (In those days you could still smoke and eat in British restaurants. I had this experience in Vienna last year and it felt hugely civilised and oddly liberating. I can't wait to go back.)
Tom Utley, then writing for the Telegraph, was one of our guests at that breakfast. Tom was, and is, a long-standing friend of Forest. Now working for the Daily Mail, he was also a guest at the Hands Off Our Packs reception last month. The London Evening Standard was represented too and published a suitably tongue-in-cheek report, if I remember.
Today every day is no smoking day and so the event that bears that name has lost much of whatever it was that appealed to the national media. It's still a media 'event' at local level ('Smokers in South Tyneside are being encouraged to kick the habit tomorrow on No Smoking Day' etc etc), which is why I'm doing a number of local radio interviews this morning, but it's not what it was.
Time, perhaps, to stub it out.
PS. Woke up this morning to hear Betty McBride of the British Heart Foundation, which now runs No Smoking Day, banging on about shisha pipes on the Today programme.
According to the BHF, an hour on a shisha pipe is the same as smoking 100 cigarettes. At least presenter Evan Davies, who admitted having smoked a shisha pipe himself, had the good grace to sound incredulous.
Now, I'm no expert, but when I was given a guided tour of the shisha bars in London's Edgware Road some years ago I was told that tobacco represents about 20 per cent of what you actually smoke in a shisha pipe – the rest is fruit peel.
There was no mention either of the sociable nature of shisha bars which don't serve alcohol but attract young and old alike.
So this is what No Smoking Day has come to. Bizarre claims and partisan scare-mongering. Seriously, it really should be put out of its misery.