Problems? What fucking problems? You’ve now got to suffer the minor hardship of going outside for a cigarette, and you’re expecting sympathy from me? Fuck off. You’ve been taking the piss for long enough, and now you’re going to reap what you’ve sown. I can think of one detriment only to the new legislation, and that’s taking out the tab machine will leave one less shelf for my pint.

Being a smoker is not a fucking disability; you can’t register and claim endless benefits for it, and there are no equalities issues here. Don’t even think about invoking civil liberties, or appealing to the Court of Human Rights – grumble grumble bloody Brussels – about the victimisation you are now apparently suffering. Your argument is, what? That it’s a basic human need to act the fucking twat? Or that you want the right to make other people smell like shite anywhere and at any time you see fit?

That’s what it boils down to for me. I’m certainly not going to chew anyone’s balls about the health risks; I couldn’t give a tsetse's testes about the dangers of smoking, passive or otherwise. Kill yourself, see if I care; kill me too if you like. Fuck knows I've got no desire to hang around any longer than necessary. I’ve been waiting for my number to come up for years, and I’ll take anything you can throw at me if it’ll help me jump the queue. It’s just the fucking stench I object to, and the arrogance that makes you think that you have the right to tell me how I am going to smell.

Try to see it from my point of view. I’ve left the house in my best clothes, showered, freshly laundered, expensively scented and carefully deodorised. Maybe I’ve popped in a Smint or two on the way to town. Every malodour has been addressed; every unpleasant whiff of the human body eradicated, yet after fifteen seconds in your presence I smell like a docker’s arsecrack. Thanks for that, fuckface. And you’re griping because I now only get the benefit of your disgusting habit when I plough through the fog at the doorway instead of for the entire duration of my pint?

Fuck. You. For what? For this: for all the holes in my best shirts where you’ve blundered into me with your cancer sticks leading your way through the murk. For all the rivers of wobbly hockle I've had to plodge through at the bus stop and in the street. For all the second hand grief I’ve taken over the years from punters on the phone, getting YOUR bollockings at work because it’s never been socially acceptable – can you believe it! – to tell the truth, that you’ve “just popped out” to stick another layer of tar on your lungs.

Do you think I enjoyed all those times that you sat with your tab in my face because you couldn’t stand having the smoke in yours? Did you think you were some sort of untouchable comedic genius from the higher echelons, as you jokingly tried to get me to “cough up” for the cigarettes you’d paid for that I was passively smoking, your wheezy chuckle breaking down into a walrus bark and an streaming-eyed expression of panic?

You imagine that you’re somehow under-privileged now that you’ve been shunted outside? You’ve now got the best bloody seats in the house now, man. Can’t you see? You’ve got the whole fucking outdoor terrace to yourselves, dissipating your fug into the open air without a care in the world, while we poor sods are trapped in here with the thumping sounds of DJ Flapz for company. And now you're crying because raindrops keep falling on your head. My heart bleeds, much in the same way as your nose and gums will if you don’t stop your incessant whining.

Every single problem you have now is one that you brought on yourself, because you are dim and weak and you pay too much heed to peer pressure. You were stupid enough to try smoking in the first place; you persevered to prove a point to your idiot friends, and now you’re addicted. The perils of carcinogens, or worry for the planet or for the safety of unborn children, all took second place to one overriding concern: your fear that you were going to be excluded from conversations of your equally cretinous friends, conversations of no importance to anyone except pariahs like yourself. From the bike sheds to the boardroom, you’ve puffed hard and staked your claim just through the terror of what they’d say about you if you weren’t standing there with them. You are pathetic. And you stink.

What, exactly, was the attraction in the first place? Did you think it would bestow some sort of cachet of cool upon you? Did you think you’d look all Hollywood with a burning tube of dust and chemical waste under your nose? Don't look so fucking good now, do you? Did you ever see James Dean cowering under the eaves, weighing up what would make the biggest mess of his shirt, the pissing rain or the splattery pigeon shite? No, not unless that was on the DVD extras. And I can’t recall Audrey Hepburn stood in the cold with her arms across her rigid frozen nipples, clutching her lighter for its slowly fading warmth. That simply wouldn’t do, would it, dahling? I’ll tell you what the magnetism was: you thought you’d look hard. That was it, wasn’t it? Fucking imbecile.

I can’t believe that the government has pussy-footed around all these years with mild warnings about the dangers of trivialities like lung disease, asthma, and respiratory malfunction when it’s clear that the real problem of smoking is that it turns you into an utter retard. Maybe that’s what they should have stuck on the front of a box of twenty: "If you smoke, you’re a stupid cunt."

Add up all the cost of introducing and publicising legislation, and of putting up signs to get the message through the skulls of thick fuckers like you who won’t listen to reason and who couldn’t give a mouthful of mucus for the poor sods around them. There’s talk of fining landlords for any dog ends found outside their pub. How the hell can that be fair? Far better to stick a surcharge on pints for smokers, hiking up the prices by a good 50% to cover any penalties from the man with the clipboard. It shouldn’t be a problem to distinguish the smokers from the sane: just look for tenners waved between yellow fingers, pallid complexions and slitty little eyes in pinched faces. Oh, and the word SCUM etched in the wrinkles on the forehead. You deserve to pay extra. You deserve to pay double, as revenge for all the faggaccino sprinkles I’ve found on my pint, for the mysterious grey glazes on the outside of my glass, and for the many times I’ve skidded and nearly set my neck on your carelessly discarded filters.

And I know it’s so hard to give it up. You’ve tried everything, I know. Patches, hypnotism, that embarrassing plastic inhaler thing: none of them seemed to do the trick. None of them had the right amount of incentive. How about this, then? Is this the sort of motivation you need? I am now offering to give you – free of charge – a good hard boot in the reproductive organs at fifteen-minute intervals, over and over and over again until you pack it in. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?

But you never will quit, because you’re a freethinking individual. You refuse to do what The Man says. You will exercise your rights as a human being by smoking wherever and whenever you so please. Am I right? Give me strength. There are songs to be sung and hearts to be broken. There are governments to be toppled, injustices to be fought, and prisoners of conscience to be freed. And you’re telling me the best you can manage in the way of rebellion is sneaking a couple off under a table or in the bogs? Is that how you’ll express your individuality and your refusal to buckle under?

Go on. Fuck off outside and do exactly as you’re told. Don’t start splitting hairs about how many sides the smoking shelter’s got, whether it’s two-sides-good-three-sides-bad, when the only sensible solution would be to wall you in completely and hermetically seal the box. You should be shoved in there with as many tabs as you want, and forced at laser-guided gunpoint to smoke ten at a time, simultaneously, with a thick fucking laccy band round them, until you either grow up or puke yourself inside out.

And if you think you're going to traipse back in here and breathe that shite all over me you can think again. Keep your filth out of my nostrils. Brush your bloody teeth before you enter my airspace. And leave your fucking clothes with the bouncer when you go out for a gasper, so nobody has to put up with the fetid aroma when you return.

Waft any more of your rotten belch on me and you’ll get what’s coming to you. You’ll see the full effects of my innocent little hobby, the one thing that gives me pleasure in this cruel, cruel world we live in. I don’t like toilet paper, you see. I find it unnatural, and when I’ve done my business I prefer to dig out the traces with my bare hands, wiping them afterwards on the skin of bystanders. Fair swap, do you reckon: a lungful of your smokebreath, for a couple of organic barcodes, a human spreadsheet of brown 111s all over your face and neck? Are you sure I can’t interest you?

Why not? It’ll wash off. It’s not harming anybody. After all, it’s a ‘free country’.

Dickhead.