ARE we really that stupid? Lung cancer is now the biggest killer of women. Kills more than breast cancer does. But while we are desperately trying to find a reason and a cure for breast cancer - campaigning, fund-raising, wearing our pink ribbons and spending a fortune on research to find out why breast cancer kills, we already know why most women get lung cancer.

In nine out of ten cases it's connected to smoking.

Got that? Clear enough for you?

Smoking kills you quicker.

And it's going to get worse. More girls than boys are now taking up smoking. Lots of them, starting often at 11 years old. It's a time bomb that's bound to explode in a fall-out of too many premature deaths in the next generation. These are the girls who are meant to be smarter than boys. If they're smart enough to get a bucketful of A*s, you'd think they'd be able to read the small print on the cigarette packet.

Fat chance. Or rather, slim chance.

These are the daughters whose toys you sterilised, whose food you prepared so lovingly. You fed them vitamins and fruit, put safety catches on cupboards, made them have early nights, taught them how to cross a road, warned them about strangers. You did everything you could to make their world safe - just so they could kill themselves with cigarettes.

One of the reasons that young girls smoke is that smoking helps you slim. If you have a desperate urge to eat a jam doughnut, you can have a smoke instead. Not quite as satisfying perhaps, but there are no calories in fag ash, so that's all right then. The more we portray an undernourished waif as the ideal female shape, the more our impressionable teenagers are going to vote for a cigarette rather than a sandwich.

Parents must share the blame too. When there is so much talk of youngsters taking ever more dangerous drugs, it's easy to be almost reassured by cigarettes. They seem normal, familiar, comparatively harmless.

Well, that's where you're wrong. The money, research and high profile given to breast cancer is beginning to have results. Deaths from the disease have fallen by five per cent. It seems a dreadful irony if we should go to all that effort and expense to save our breasts and then ignore our lungs beneath them.

It doesn't require great research programmes, sophisticated equipment or advanced technology to cut deaths from lung cancer. Just common sense and a bit of determination. And that's what women are meant to be good at, so let's prove it.

WIVES are a Good Thing. Record winning Olympic champion Steve Redgrave would have given up three years ago and never even attempted a fifth medal if it hadn't been for his wife Ann, who encouraged him, coaxed him and drove him on to his great triumph.

William Hague, meanwhile, has said that it was only because wife Ffion gave him his total support, that he was able to go for the Tory leadership.

Many big companies don't like giving senior posts to single men. It's not prejudice, it's common sense.

However self-contained and independent we are, there are times when we all need someone to console us, comfort us, drive us on or warn us that we are about to make complete prats of ourselves.

Anyone can do it. But after thousands of years of training, wives still do it best.

IT is now theoretically possible for two gay men to conceive a child that would be the biological issue of them both. Even in wishy-washy liberal moments I can't help thinking there might be more urgent calls on the amount of money and research such a pregnancy would cost.

However, those who are against it should be cautious of calling such conception unnatural. Organ transplants, blood transfusions and pacemakers are all "unnatural". Would you want to do away with those as well?