IT SEEMS like centuries since people smoked in bars and pubs. Hard to believe it was only five years ago.

Those days where you got home and your hair smelled of fags, your clothes smelled of smoke, and you felt like you’d been dancing next to a bonfire for 14 hours, have long since gone.

This week, cigarette manufacturers trading abroad have taken another knock, with legislation in Australia which dictates fags will soon be sold in drab olive packaging.

From December, packets which go on sale Down Under will feature large, graphic health warnings and brand names will be written in a small generic font. It is thought this could follow on in Britain in the future.

It seems like you will soon have to know a secret dance - the tobacco groove - to get your nicotine fix. A retailer will then take you out the back door and hand you a padlocked box in a paper bag, but only after 9pm on Wednesdays.

It doesn’t affect me directly, because I don’t smoke, and that is true for most of the people I know.

The only time anyone around me suggested it was cool was when I was 14. Back then, a queue of badass street kids used to wait around the corner shop to beg older kids to buy them fags.

Some of the sixth formers would make the most of this business opportunity, and sell fags on at around 400 per cent of their retail price.

I din’t get it and I couldn’t afford it. I had 50p every Thursday and I used to spend it on Fry’s Turkish Delight and Fruit Salad sweets.

It wasn’t because my mother was a GP, it wasn’t because I knew people who had lung cancer. The reason I never got into smoking was because I knew about it. And in the broad light of day smoking is a no-win option.

Hiding fags behind a counter screen or changing their packaging is not nearly as powerful in their demise as the shift in society that has come through better education. And the nation’s hair smells better for it.