Courtesy of Dick Puddlecote I see that New York State senators are going to ban novelty cigarette lighters.
This allows me to dust off a story I have told before.
Many years ago Forest hosted a party at Little Havana, a Cuban-style cigar bar off Leicester Square in London.
We combined it with the Forest Annual Awards and one guest, Daily Record columnist Bob Shields, travelled all the way from Glasgow to receive our Smoker-Friendly Journalist of the Year award.
Bob had earned the accolade because a few months earlier he and a Record photographer had joined a group of Forest supporters who had 'escaped' to Paris rather than submit to the hell that was No Smoking Day in Britain.
The subsequent double-page spread in the Record, featuring photographs of Bob lighting up in front of the Eiffel Tower with my then colleague Juliette Wallbridge and some of our party blowing smoke rings in a Eurostar smoking coach remains one of my proudest Forest moments.
But that's another story.
Anyway, to mark his achievement we presented Bob with a novelty lighter that was an actual size replica of a hand grenade. He was delighted.
We purchased three from a tobacconist in Victoria Street, close to our old London office. I liked them because they were made of metal, were quite heavy and came in different colours - gold, silver and bronze.
To cut a long story short, Bob's lighter was confiscated by security staff at Gatwick shortly before he boarded his flight home.
The following year we tried to buy more but the Victoria Street tobacconist no longer sold them. They came from Germany, apparently.
We searched online but eventually gave up and apart from very small ones I've never seen anything like it again.
Now New York is banning all novelty lighters. Whatever next?
See: State Senate approves bill banning novelty lighters (New York Daily News)