IT'S 34 years since I last smoked a cigarette, but I can recall the taste and pleasure of smoking as if I'd just put one out.

Like most of my generation and class - industrial suburb, football, comics and the local bug hutch cinema - I took my first drag in my early teens

. It was regarded as manly for men to smoke and chic for women. All those black and white films where lovers blow smoke into one another's eyes as a metaphor - like the crashing waves on the shore - for sexual intercourse.

On the way to school we used to buy our cigarettes in ones and twos from Mrs Pearson's tuck shop: Woodbines tuppence and Senior Service or Players tuppence-halfpenny.

We smoked in the school lavatories and were regularly caught and caned. Now they've banned the cane and they want to ban cigarettes.

Smokers are now outcast and despised as lepers were in the Bible. I pass these pathetic creatures every morning on the way to the newsagent's as they huddle shirt sleeved, even in today's brass monkey weather, in office doorways. They are pitied, mocked and loathed as self-indulgent enemies of the people.

But let's hear it for the pleasures of smoking - before even to write in praise of the weed becomes an offence that can seriously damage your standing as a human being. I used to love that first drag in the morning which set your head spinning agreeably and revved up the pulse rate. Coffee and a fag were what got the nation going at the start of every day. Then there was the one you smoked when you got to work - not secretly in the loo like a junkie shooting up - but openly in the office. Another of the great pleasures of smoking was social: you and your mates took turns to offer the fag packet in the same way you bought rounds of drinks.

I know about the dangers of smoking and I gave it up in 1969 when I developed a nasty cough. My uncle and my dad - moderate smokers both - died of lung cancer so I don't need to be nagged about how many commit slow suicide every year by smoking. And I've even read of the supposed dangers of passive smoking - though I admit this always makes me want to sit down and write a satirical column about the dangers of passive drinking and passive bonking.

Nowadays I can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke and no one in our family smokes regularly. But my wife and I are not so discourteous that we forbid visitors from smoking indoors. I don't smoke but I don't want to ban tobacco. This has nothing to do with economics which say rightly that a ban would just send smoking to the black market and incidentally lose the NHS billions in tax revenue. I deplore the proposal to ban cigarettes because I hate the health fascists who want to control our lives from the pure pink lungs of our infancy to the emphysemic splutterings of old age.

We are told we live in a democracy. This means tolerating activities you don't approve. I don't like the mindless cult of the mobile phone and the hideous clique of texting. I think football is a crueller sport than foxhunting. But I would not ban any of these things. Live and let live - and even live and let die.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.