This is a topic about consideration and thoughtfulness for others.

It can be easy for a non-smoker to be antagonistic towards smokers. It is even easier for an ex-smoker, for no-one is more anti-something than one who has managed to give it up themselves.

Smoking is a polluting habit, as well as being dangerous as a cause of cancer and other potentially lethal health problems. Smokers introduce smoke into the atmosphere, and even when they do not breath actual smoke into the atmosphere, they bring the smell of smoke wherever they go.

A person sitting in a railway carriage, watching another passenger having a last, desperate puff on the platform before the train departs, will be grateful for the smoke free atmosphere on the train. But if the smoker, having put out the cigarette, then comes and sits next to or opposite the other person, the smell of the smoker’s clothes and breath will be obvious and unpleasant. How much worse it is for a non-smoker to come face to face with a smoker who is breathing smoke in their face.

It is difficult to think of any circumstance in which a non-smoker could cause any level of unpleasantness to a smoker. Is the smoker going to complain because the non-smoker brings clean air where ever he goes? Is the smoker going to complain because the non-smoker’s clothes smell clean and pleasant?

Yet there are many circumstances in which non-smokers would wish to complain. One particular one which comes to mind is the person who wishes to sit on the terrace outside a restaurant on a warm, sunny day to enjoy their meal, only to be irritated by the smokers who are forced to eat outside as they cannot smoke in the restaurant itself.

Smoking in front of a non-smoker is inconsiderate, and therefore is disrespectful. It does not take much for a person to ask if another minds if they smoke, but for some smokers this seems to be a question too far. This is a free society, they might say, and I am entitled to smoke whenever I like, excluding, of course, those places where it is now forbidden.

One could argue, from a sympathetic point of view, that the smoker is driven by an addiction which causes them to do something they may truly wish they could avoid. But society seems now to accept, through the recent legislation banning smoking in certain public places, that smoking is dangerous, not just to the smoker, but to the passive smoker also. This being the case, whether the smoker likes to accept the fact or not, a level of consideration towards non-smokers is to be expected.

Although we live in a free society this does not give us the freedom to be inconsiderate or disrespectful or unpleasant to another person. That is how it seems to the non-smoker when faced with a smoker.

Smokers would do well to remember, if they are not to cause continual irritation and offence to others, that it is generous and considerate to ask before smoking in front of a non-smoker.