Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a nanny free New Year.

Christmas past and Christmas presents

This is my penultimate post before Christmas so let me leave you with a few childhood memories.

Note: If you have no interest in my childhood memories of Christmas, and I don't blame you, I bid you adieu and wish you a very happy Christmas!

A few weeks ago I mentioned spending one Christmas with my grandparents in Colchester. It was 1967 or 1968, I can't remember which.

They lived just round the corner from my aunt and uncle whose architect-designed home, built in 1962, was featured (unflatteringly) in a Channel 4 series called Ugly House to Lovely House (see here).

Even though I can't be certain of the year, I remember that Christmas for several reasons, one of which was the minor accident we had driving to Colchester on Christmas Eve.

The traffic was slow moving but it was dark and raining heavily when we aquaplaned into the back of the car in front.

If I remember correctly, my father had accelerated in response to an approaching car whose driver had flashed his lights, inviting us to go first past some roadworks that had reduced the road to a single lane.

It was courteous of the other driver but the kind gesture had unfortunate consequences when we ran into car ahead of us.

What I remember most was the fact that our hamster was in a cage on the back seat between me and my sister, and when we hit the car in front the cage shot forward, giving the hamster a short, sharp shock.

In those days there were no seat belts in the back of cars so my sister and I must have been thrown forward too, but no-one was hurt, the car was repaired over Christmas, and we drove home none the worse for the experience. (The hamster was fine too.)

A few years before that I remember staying with my other grandparents at their thatched cottage in deepest, rural Dorset.

Parts of the house were 300-years-old and I loved going there because it was so different to our own house on a rapidly expanding housing estate in Maidenhead that was built to cater for an influx of residents following the completion of the first stage of the new M4 motorway.

I was four or five-years-old and still believed in Father Christmas, and I remember lying in bed trying very hard to stay awake to see him deliver our presents.

Needless to say I failed and the next morning Santa had delivered my presents to the bottom of my bed. (I didn't question how he knew we were staying with my grandparents, but it probably sowed the first seeds of doubt in my mind.)

Santa's presents included my first Hornby train set. It was no more than a small oval track with a single locomotive but I played with it all morning, stopping only for lunch.

Over the next few years it developed into something far more substantial - multiple trains on interconnecting tracks pinned to a large wooden board, with electric points, overhead wires, and a station. But I’ll never forget the joy of that initial track and train.

Another present I remember getting (when I was seven or eight) was a small battery powered transistor radio.

By today's standards the sound was thin and crackly but I loved it, and the first thing I did was listen to Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart visiting some hospital wards for the Christmas Day edition of Junior Choice.

The radio could be held in one hand and was small enough to fit in my coat pocket. After we moved to Scotland, and I started watching Dundee United, I would take it to games and listen to the half-times scores, followed by Sports Report on the bus on the way home.

In fact, the radio would be glued to my ear from the moment I left the ground and walked down the hill to the bus station, a distance of about a mile.

Occasionally I would listen to it under the bedclothes after I had gone to bed. Specifically, I remember listening to the commentary during extra-time in the 1970 FA Cup final replay between Leeds and Chelsea.

I couldn’t celebrate the winning goal by Chelsea’s David Webb because I didn’t want my parents to know I was listening, but they probably knew.

(I watched the first 90 minutes on television but the match was on a Wednesday, a school day, and they didn't want me to stay up beyond my normal bedtime.)

We had moved to Scotland in May 1969 so the game marked the start of our second year north of the border.

I remember our first Christmas in Scotland for two reasons. First, my father had to go to work in the morning because in those days neither Christmas Day nor Boxing Day were public holidays in Scotland. Instead, the nation’s focus was on New Year, aka Hogmanay.

Second, my sister and I were each given a traditional wooden toboggan, or sledge, as our main present. Crazy, I know, but my parents must have thought we about to experience lots of snow.

To be fair, more snow fell then than it does now, but the only time I remember using the sledge was on a day trip to the Cairngorms.

Unfortunately, the snow was so soft neither of our sledges would move an inch because as soon as we sat on them the metal runners would sink in to the snow.

I suspect we may have been the last generation of children to have wooden toboggans with metal runners because shortly after that everyone seemed to have flat-bottomed plastic sleds and our beautiful but useless sledges were consigned to history.

We got greater use out of the roller skates we were given a year or two later, but that’s not saying much!

As a child my favourite Christmas present was probably the black and white leather football I was given in 1970. A replica of the ball used in the World Cup in Mexico, it screamed Pele, Jairzinho, Gordon Banks and Gerd Muller, and I loved it.

Made up of twelve black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, the simple non-branded design has never been bettered, in my opinion.

My friends liked it too and it was adopted as our match ball for games against local teams from Newport, Tayport, and St Andrews.

It still hurt when heading it, though. In fact, I don’t remember anyone in our team heading it intentionally, even though it spent a lot of time in the air.

In contrast, my biggest disappointment was probably the chess set I was given when I was twelve.

I had joined the lunchtime chess club at school so I asked my parents for a chess set, never thinking they would buy a miniature set with tiny plastic pieces that had to be pushed into holes on a metal board.

What were they thinking?

I assume they thought it looked modern compared to the traditional wooden set I was expecting. It was certainly the sort of thing you might have found in Habitat, if Habitat sold chess sets.

Worse, I discovered their error several days before Christmas because I knew where they kept our presents so I naturally had a quick peak when they were out.

To be fair, I hid my disappointment well but my attempt to be a grandmaster was abandoned a few months later when I left the chess club following a humiliating defeat at the hands of a chess club from another school.

The game, I decided, was not for me, so perhaps my parents were right not to invest in a full size set.

Today, in my 65th year, most Christmases are a bit of a blur, partly because we do the same thing every year. The only things that have changed is that we watch less TV, and the tree goes up much earlier.

My parents used to put the tree up a few days before Christmas, and for many years we did the same. It was edging earlier (mid December) but Covid was the game changer because I swear we were encouraged to put the tree up at the beginning of the month in order to bring a little bit of cheer into our otherwise grim lives.

Personally, if it wasn’t frowned upon by ‘tradition’, I’d keep the tree, with its bright and cheerful lights, for most of January. Why not?

There's another reason, though, for extending its use. A 6-7ft Christmas tree costs around £70 and I want my money's worth!

It's worth noting too that in the Sixties a real Christmas tree would have dropped most of its needles within a few weeks, which is one reason why artificial trees became so popular in the Seventies, but today’s trees last much longer.

It didn’t help that back then our house had central heating that delivered warm air to the sitting room through vents in the wall.

The air would come on and off depending on the temperature in the room, and when it was on it had a magical effect because many of the baubles on the tree would spin round.

I remember, in particular, three red, blue and white baubles, covered in glitter, that, when spinning, created an hypnotic kaleidoscopic effect.

Unfortunately the warm air accelerated the drying out process, hence the rapid loss of needles.

In my twenties, after leaving home, I always returned to my parents for Christmas, but prior to Christmas Day I would invite half a dozen friends for an early Christmas lunch cooked by me.

One year - and I’ve told this story before - I left the Christmas pudding steaming in a pan on the stove while we went to the pub, and when I returned to my flat (in Ravenscourt Park near Hammersmith) thick black smoke was pouring from the basement window.

The pan had boiled dry, and the heat had burned an enormous hole in the bottom. There was nothing left of the Christmas pudding but, miraculously, the turkey - which was in the oven - was fine.

The walls of the tiny studio flat were blackened with thick particles of soot but it didn’t affect our lunch which went ahead as planned.

To this day I still marvel at the memory of my guests sitting down to eat in a room that, less than an hour earlier, had been full of thick black smoke.

Less forgiving was the landlord, an actor who lived with his family in the house above. As soon as I returned after Christmas I was asked to vacate the flat so they could clean and redecorate it, which was understandable.

It was made clear, though, that I wasn’t expected to return. (He now lives in France but that’s another story …)

Fast forward to 1995 and one of my favourite Christmas Days, which we spent driving from Edinburgh to Gatwick where we stayed overnight in a nearby hotel before flying to the Cayman Islands (via Miami) on Boxing Day.

For most of the journey there were relatively few cars on the road so we had a clear run, and the day was entirely stress free.

That’s the closest we’ve come to spending Christmas abroad but it’s on my bucket list.

In the meantime I've suggested to my wife that we rent a cottage for Christmas - in Cumbria, Yorkshire, or Scotland - as we did at New Year when we were younger, but she prefers to stay at home.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. If you've got this far, thank you. Let me finish by wishing you a very happy Christmas, wherever you are.

Guilty pleasures and a dirty little secret

Each week in The Times an actor, author, artist or musician is invited to name and explain their favourite book, film, lyric, box set, piece of music, and so on.

There is also a question about their guiltiest cultural pleasure so, for what it’s worth, here are my guilty pleasures plus a dirty little secret:

Television
Double First (BBC1)
A sitcom by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, who also wrote The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles, Double First featured the late Michael Williams and a young Holly Aird who later appeared in Soldier, Soldier (ITV) and Waking The Dead (BBC1). Williams had enjoyed great success playing opposite his wife, Judi Dench, in A Fine Romance (written by Larbey) but Double First lasted for just seven episodes and to the best of my knowledge it has never been repeated anywhere. It wasn’t laugh out loud funny but it was rather charming. It's a genuine mystery to me why it’s been airbrushed out of television history.

Radio
Elaine Paige (Radio 2)
Touchline Tales (Radio 4)
This category had me stumped because I couldn’t think of a single radio programme that might be called a ‘guilty' pleasure. Does Elaine Paige on Sunday count? Probably not but she makes me laugh and it’s a good excuse to post this:

The only other programme that might be called a guilty pleasure was Touchline Tales which was co-hosted by Des Lynam. It ran for three series from 2011 to 2013 but I missed it first time round, only catching up with it when it was repeated on 4 Extra a few years ago. Lynam was a huge loss to the BBC when he moved to ITV Sport in 1999 but his conversational style was never going to be suited to ITV’s pacier style, rushing from one ad break to the next. In contrast Touchline Tales was the perfect vehicle for his laconic wit but his return to the BBC was low key and short-lived. He had a fantastic broadcasting career but it still feels like it ended too soon.

DJ
Tony Blackburn
I’ve always liked Tony Blackburn and when I met him before recording the pilot for a TV programme starring Marcus Brigstocke (it was a chat show and we were both guests), he appeared genuinely modest, self-effacing, and interested in having a conversation with people other than his fellow 'stars'. (If you've ever sat in a green room with a 'celebrity' you'll know how rare that is.) His life has been a series of ups and downs, personally and professionally, but I love the fact that he is still working and has never taken himself too seriously. I became even more of a fan when he interviewed me on BBC Radio Berkshire and conducted the interview with impeccable impartiality, playing Devil’s advocate when necessary but never imposing his own views on listeners. He could and perhaps should have had an opportunity to have his own show on a national talk radio station but in many people’s minds – including broadcasting execs – he will always be ‘that 60s DJ’ playing ‘Flowers In The Rain’ with the assistance of Arnold the barking dog. Woof, woof!

TV presenter
Keith Chegwin
The late Keith Chegwin, aka Cheggers, was a modern day Tigger who always brought a smile to my face even though, after Swap Shop in the Seventies, I rarely saw him on TV. I was too old for Cheggers Plays Pop and far too prim for Naked Jungle which he cheerfully called "the worst career move of my life". Occasionally I saw him on breakfast TV knocking on doors or waking up some unsuspecting celebrity, and despite his well documented problems with alcohol he maintained a wonderfully upbeat persona. Before his death in 2016 he apparently upset some current comedians for allegedly plagiarising their jokes by posting them on social media without crediting them, but I believe his intentions were sincere – he just wanted to make people laugh and brighten their day.

Pop music
Buck’s Fizz
Apart from a compilation album released long after the original group split up, I haven’t bought a single Buck’s Fizz record. Nevertheless ‘Making Your Mind Up’, which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1981, is a cheery reminder that that there’s nothing wrong with simple, unpretentious pop songs. Several subsequent singles were just as good, if not better. You’ll be familiar with some but others, like ‘Heart of Stone’ (a hit for Cher) and ‘I Hear Talk’ have been largely forgotten, except by me. Pity. They were well-crafted pop songs that deserved greater recognition.

Children’s author
Enid Blyton
Does Enid Blyton qualify as a guilty pleasure? She shouldn’t because she is one of the greatest children’s authors of all time, but attitudes change and Blyton is now dismissed by some as a relic of Britain’s imperial age. The books are dated, for sure, but that’s part of their charm. As I explained when I took part in a Bookshop Barnie Balloon Debate at Foyle’s Bookshop a few years ago, my debt to Blyton lies in the fact that I was apparently slow to read when I was five or six. It was only when I was introduced to Blyton at the age of seven that my reading took off - and for that I shall always be grateful.

Fiction
Agatha Christie
It’s several decades since I read an Agatha Christie novel, possibly because I read almost every one in my teens and once you know the ending there seems little point in reading them again. For several years however I read little else. Today I would be hard pressed to remember most of the plots so perhaps I should go back to them. That said, I still remember how shocked I was at the revelation of the killer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. If you haven’t read it I won’t spoil it for you, but I didn’t see that coming!

Non-fiction
Flash Gordon: The Official Story of the Film
This is a relatively recent guilty pleasure because John Walsh's beautifully produced book was only published in November 2020. The first and only time I saw the film on the big screen was at the Odeon Marble Arch on Christmas Eve 1980. I remember it well because I delayed my National Express coach journey to my parents in Derbyshire so I could watch the 11.00am screening. The book doesn't ignore the film's faults but it's a loving celebration of a cult classic that famously features a soundtrack by Queen, some magnificent lines (“Flash! Flash, I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!!”), and Brian (“Gordon’s alive?!”) Blessed. According to Blessed, Flash Gordon was the Queen’s favourite film, but I’d take that with a pinch of salt. The book, however, is a fine addition to any bookshelf and has pride of place in my office.

Film
Tory Boy: The Movie
Directed by and featuring the same John Walsh who wrote ‘Flash Gordon: The Official Story of the Film’, Tory Boy is a genuinely funny film that raised some serious issues about politics in Britain. It follows Walsh in his unsuccessful bid to unseat the sitting Labour MP in Middlesbrough in 2010. As his Flash Gordon book might suggest, there is something a bit nerdy about Walsh but everything is done with a smile and a knowing nod, and whatever your politics it’s hard not to root for him. In hindsight Tory Boy might have predicted the fall of the ‘Red Wall’ in 2019 because it marks the first stirring of discontent with a Labour party that took for granted the idea that its traditional seats in the North East were rock solid. Best of all, Walsh used humour to target an opponent who was an infrequent visitor to his constituency but was eventually tracked down in Paris where he appeared to be living. Apart from a few press screenings I’m not sure if it ever got a cinema release but writing this inspired me to dig out the DVD and watch it again and although more than a decade has passed, and the political landscape has changed multiple times, Tory Boy is still funny and shocking in equal measure.

And finally this is not so much a guilty pleasure as a dirty little secret ...

In concert
The Nolans
After graduating in 1980 I moved to London from Aberdeen. Dougie Kerr, a friend from university, had got a job at the Foreign Office and one Sunday evening (with nothing better to do) we went to Wembley Arena to watch The Nolans (aka The Nolan Sisters). I don’t remember much about it apart from clapping along to ‘I’m In The Mood For Dancing’. It would have been rude not to but the shame has never left me and I have never told anyone else, until now.

None of the above

Amazon has sent me an email featuring half a dozen books ‘we think you might like’.

Worryingly, the list includes titles by arch Remainers Ian Dunt (‘How Westminster Works … and Why It Doesn’t’), Alastair Campbell ('But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong and How You Can Help Fix It'), and Chris Bryant ('Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How To Do It').

Goodness knows why the algorithm thinks I might like them but if anyone wants to buy me a book for Christmas, here's a hint ... none of the above.

Christmas in Cambridge

For years my wife has ordered the majority of her Christmas shopping, presents included, online.

I’ve generally rejected this approach, preferring the traditional dash round the shops in the final days before Christmas.

One reason is that smaller items, if pushed through our letter box by the postman or delivery driver, are vulnerable to attack by the dog who reacts as if the house has been invaded by enemy aliens.

(If we are invaded by aliens, or burglars, this might be useful, but at the moment it’s just annoying.)

I also like the instant gratification of buying stuff and taking it home with me rather than waiting several days for it to be delivered, although Amazon Prime’s next day delivery service is the next best thing and a lot less time-consuming.

It's true too that there's often more choice online. My other excuse however is that I quite enjoy pottering around town and city centres in the days before Christmas.

Not the shops, obviously, which are hellishly busy unless you get in very early, but the streets and markets.

If it’s not raining I enjoy the atmosphere - the lights and decorations - and what I usually do, after a short walk, is find a nice coffee shop where I can read the paper or watch the world go by for an hour or two.

Cambridge, where Forest is still based (we moved here in 2005 after our London office became ridiculously expensive), is one of England’s more attractive towns (in the centre at least) but even Peterborough, which is equidistant from where I live, has some appeal at Christmas.

It doesn’t have a great reputation but people forget that before the Sixties, when it started to expand, Peterborough was a relatively small town dominated by an historic cathedral off the main square.

Unfortunately its 20th century equivalent - the large John Lewis store in the main shopping centre - has now closed, so that’s a major disincentive to go there to shop, especially when the Cambridge store is still open.

Anyway, I’ve finally come round to my wife’s way of thinking and this year I’ve ordered almost everything - bar the turkey, which we get from a local butcher - online.

Most if not all items have been delivered within two or three days and, I have to say, I’m feeling far less stressed than usual.

The dog almost got his teeth into one package that was pushed through the letterbox despite his very obvious barking on the other side, but I managed to wrestle it off him before any serious damage was done.

Thankfully most items are too big to go through the letterbox but it does mean regular trips to the front door when delivery men come a-knocking, which can be awkward if you’re in the middle of a Zoom or Teams meeting.

What I am missing, though, is the sound of a live Christmas choir or even Roy Wood belting out ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ over an in-store audio system.

I also miss the Christmas lights so tomorrow I intend to spend the morning in Cambridge getting into the festive spirit.

I’ll begin with coffee and a bun in Fitzbillies. After that I’ll take a stroll round the open air market (above).

Weather permitting, I shall then wander around some of the college grounds, if they're open to visitors. (Days and times vary.)

Thereafter, I may pop in to Fopp, the small independent record store I wrote about in 2007 when it was one of a handful of Fopp shops that survived a major cull.

If I have time, I may also visit the cigar shop where, a few years ago, I was invited by the Cambridge University Conservative Association to give a short talk.

Finally, I'll visit one of the small independent bookshops where I intend to buy something for myself.

Cambridge - Town & Gown is a remarkable collection of photographs that were originally posted on a website called A Cambridge Diary.

It featured a new portrait taken every day for 13 years, but I only stumbled upon it quite recently.

Needless to say, photographer Martin Bond ended his daily challenge almost as soon as I started following him, but he's created an archive of over 5,000 pictures, which is hugely impressive.

Funnily enough, we’ve lived near Cambridge for 24 years but we’ve never attended the famous Christmas carol service at King's College Chapel, although my wife listens to it religiously (no pun intended) on the BBC every year.

As it happens, there are two services. The first, broadcast by BBC2 on Christmas Eve, is recorded in the middle of December and is restricted to members of the college.

The second, on Christmas Eve but broadcast on Radio 4 on Christmas Day, is free and open to members of the public if you're willing to queue for hours, which I'm not.

Instead, when the children were younger, we would take them to the carol concert at Ely Cathedral, 17 miles north of Cambridge. It's a wonderful building but impossible to heat and therefore very cold at this time of year.

Thank goodness, then, for Pizza Express and mulled wine.

Vaping - the two faces of ASH

According to MailOnline:

Demonising vaping is prompting young people to switch to tobacco as mixed messaging suggests they are equally as dangerous, experts warn

Deborah Arnott, CEO of ASH, told the paper:

“All the negative press around vaping hasn’t helped,” she said. “Suggestions that vapes need to be in plain packaging, branded with health warnings and kept out of sight, like tobacco, just give the impression that both are equally harmful when that’s not the case.”

That’s all well and good.

In March, however, responding to a study that found that ‘removing bright colours, pictures and fancy lettering from packaging made youngsters less likely to be attracted to vaping, but did not deter adults who wanted to use vapes to quit cigarettes’, Arnott took a different view:

“The Government,” she said, “should take note and commit to implementing standardised packaging for vapes and vaping products without delay.”

A few months later, responding to another study, her deputy Hazel Cheeseman declared:

“Quantifying the impact on children of the growing promotion of vapes is crucial to determine the scale of the problem and how it can be best addressed. This analysis shows that in-store promotion has the biggest impact, which is why ASH is advocating that promotion and display of e-cigarettes in shops should be prohibited, as should the child-friendly packaging and labelling of vapes.”

So, if I’ve got this right, the CEO of ASH believes that calling for vapes to be sold “in plain packaging … and kept out of sight, like tobacco” would “give the impression that both are equally harmful when that’s not the case.”

Yet she and the group’s deputy CEO have, in the last eight months, urged the Government to (a) ban the promotion and display of e-cigarettes in shops, and (b) introduce standardised packaging for vapes, “without delay”.

Confused? Me too.

See also: With friends like these (a gentle reminder)

Smoking costs UK economy £50bn a year says vaping industry, quoting ASH

While The Times has been busy publishing a series of attacks on Big Tobacco and vaping, I was amused to see the vaping industry parrot ASH concerning the cost of smoking to the economy.

According to a statement by the UKVIA on LinkedIn:

Smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year. Coupled with the emotional cost to the 76,000 families who lose a loved one every year, the public health role of vapes, proven as the most effective way for smokers to quit, is increasingly critical.

The £50bn figure comes from a press release issued by ASH on December 6, the day the consultation on smoking and vaping legislation closed.

According to ASH:

Smoking costs England £49.2 billion each year in lost productivity and service costs, plus an additional £25.9 billion lost quality adjusted life years due to premature death from smoking.

The claim got very little coverage so kudos to the UKVIA for spreading the word. (I’m kidding. You’d have to be extremely gullible to believe such rubbish, so let’s put it down to self-interest.)

Contemplating those figures does however make me nostalgic for the days when treating smoking-related diseases was said to cost the NHS a mere £800,000 a year.

That sum later jumped to £1.5bn, then £2.5bn, before peaking at £2.7bn. Today ASH says it’s £2.2bn, although no-one really knows because it’s all based on estimates and calculations, and blaming smoking ignores the fact that most ‘smoking-related’ diseases are multifactorial.

So how did we get from there to the figure of £50bn?

You can probably trace it back to the fact that whenever ASH raised the cost of smoking to the NHS, opponents were able to point out that smokers actually contributed £10bn to the economy (£12bn if you included VAT) through tobacco duty so, economically at least, they were a net benefit.

And that’s how the argument played out for many years. It got to the stage where I was delighted if the subject was raised in interviews because we always won that particular argument. The receipts were clear and on our side.

To combat this, ASH eventually moved the goalposts and argued that the true cost of smoking to the country was, in fact, £12bn a year.

But it didn’t end there.

Despite falling smoking rates, in January 2022 it was announced that the cost of smoking to the economy had risen by £5bn to £17bn.

This year we hit peak absurdity when a report claimed that the total cost of smoking to the UK economy in 2022 was just over £173 billion!!

As I wrote here (February 10):

This absurdly inflated figure is broken down as follows:

1. Productivity costs. These total just under £31 billion. The largest single component is reduced output due to expenditure on tobacco products compared to other goods and services, amounting to just under £14 billion. Reduced employment for smokers compared to non-smokers, and reduced earnings for working smokers compared to non-smokers, both account for between £7 billion and £8 billion of reduced productivity.

2. Service costs. These total just over £18.6 billion. The additional cost of informal care in the social sector is the largest single component of service costs at just over £9 billion, followed by the cost of additional unmet need for social care services at just over £5.7 billion, and the cost of smoking to the NHS at £2.2 billion.

3. Cost of early deaths from smoking. This is the largest single component of costs at just under £124 billion.

Curiously, the link to the report on the ASH website no longer works, so we are left with the most recent claim that ‘smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year’.

Which is it? £14bn, £17bn, £50bn, or £173bn?

Or none of the above?

I’m confused, but as the former chairman of Forest, the late Lord Harris of High Cross, once wrote:

If laymen dare to question any of these guesstimates and projections, the sophisticated statisticians take refuge behind their computers which have been heavily programmed to incorporate a variety of elaborate assumptions and statistical techniques.

And since researchers have discovered that the bigger the reported risk the better the chance of attracting funding and getting their results published (known in the trade as ‘publication bias’), they have exerted much ingenuity in what is known as ‘data dredging’ – that is, torturing the statistics until they confess!

The hilarious thing is not that the UKVIA has fallen for this claptrap (I suspect they know it’s nonsense) but they must think there’s some benefit in recycling it.

Either way, I fear it will end in tears.

How soon, for example, before the cost of vaping to society is being similarly assessed and exaggerated by ASH and other nicotine control groups? (You could say the process has started already, albeit the current focus is on schools, not society at large.)

Cherry-picking figures that play to the Government’s anti-smoking agenda is going to look pretty foolish when those same sources start calculating the alleged cost of vaping, as they undoubtedly will, sooner or later.

Meanwhile it was reported by The Times this week that the All Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, formerly the APPG for E-Cigarettes, has apparently closed down after chairman Mark Pawsey decided he was unable to commit any further time to the role, and no-one else wanted to do it.

That’s the spirit!

Are young people quietly rebelling against the anti-smoking killjoys?

Nigel Farage, 59, wasn't the only smoker among the cast of I'm A Celebrity 2023.

According to the Independent:

After surviving 23 days deprived of food, hot showers and a flushable toilet, Sam Thompson emerged from the I’m a Celebrity jungle desperate for one thing … a drag on a cigarette.

The 31-year-old Made in Chelsea star puffed away at the show’s wrap party and joined a long list of cool kids who love to light up.

Interestingly, the article – Why smoking is back in fashion for Generation Z – coincides with the publication of a study this week that suggests that 'more young people in England took up smoking during the pandemic, stagnating the years-long decline among 18 to 24-year-olds'.

At 31, Thompson is a Millennial rather than Gen Z, but he's arguably still indicative of something I wrote as part of my recent Letter on Liberty, 'Freedom: Up In Smoke?'.

Commenting on young people smoking, I quoted a story recorded by a student at Trinity College, Dublin:

Walking into campus through the Arts Block one morning, I was confronted by a screen declaring Trinity a ‘tobacco-free campus’. Not only was I surprised, having not heard this once in my six months of studying here, but my confusion was further justified once I walked past the arts block and saw the revolving cast of smokers standing outside. Trinity may declare itself tobacco free, but it is certainly not in practice.

Meanwhile, I added:

The Tab Student Smoking Survey 2021 revealed that ‘52 per cent of students who took our survey say they smoke cigarettes’. That surprised me, but one explanation (other than the fact that it was a self-selecting poll) may be that many students are social smokers - they can’t afford to be heavy smokers, nor are they addicted to smoking. Despite the health concerns about smoking … there remains a quiet rebellion among the young against the killjoys who want to dictate how we live our lives.

When I wrote that back in July I also had in mind some recent experiences of my own. For example, when I spoke at a small event at Edinburgh University in April, my host, an undergraduate, insisted that smoking is far from uncommon among students.

Others, also in their early twenties, have said pretty much the same thing to me, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes too.

I'm not suggesting, as the Independent would have us believe, that 'smoking is back in fashion for Generation Z', but I do think that the more the Government and the humourless anti-smoking industry continues with its war on smoking, the cooler it will be to smoke.

That's just human nature, and it's why the generational ban on the sale of tobacco will almost certainly prove counter-productive.

Ban the sale of tobacco to new generations of adults and smoking will instantly gain the allure of forbidden fruit.

The Government clearly hasn't thought this through but as Ella Whelan, editor of Letters on Liberty, said at our recent Nanny State of the Nation event:

"I think Rishi Sunak might not have met many young people ... I also know that young people haven't lost their rebellious spirit."

I think she’s right. And if it’s true (stats vary) that the decline in smoking rates among young adults has stalled, banning the sale of tobacco to that same demographic could be the most provocative thing any government could do to a generation that doesn’t expect or wish to be told how to live their lives.

Update: Chris Snowdon has commented on the smoking rate story here. I think he’s sceptical.

My response to the apparent contradiction between smoking rates flatlining and tobacco sales falling during the same period is that the cost of cigarettes and hand rolled tobacco may be forcing smokers to purchase less, legally at least.

Also, and this is pure speculation on my part, but my guess is that many smokers in their twenties are not habitual smokers but occasional social smokers.

The combination of the two would therefore explain what to Chris seems an inconsistent anomaly.

Ultimately, though, what matters is that adults of all ages have the right to purchase tobacco if they want to. Whether smoking rates are going up, in decline, or flatlining, is irrelevant.

All you can be sure of is that the tobacco control industry will spin any study to its advantage. On that I do agree with Chris.

Below: Ella Whelan speaking last month