Love will find a way...

The Times dramatises one of the few benefits of the smoking ban:

’Scuse me, love, have you got a light?
Look I’m flattered, really I am. But I’ve got a boyfriend.
Er . . . right. But could I just borrow your lighter? I’m gasping for a fag.
Say what you really mean, for heaven’s sake. You’re actually gasping for a shag. Men are forever smirting with me outside this pub.
No offence, but what you on about?
Smirting . . . It’s what people like us do when we’re cast outside non-smoking pubs and restaurants to have a ciggie. We smoke and flirt at the same time and it makes us feel sexy rather than like stinking lepers. I think it’s rather beautiful.
Standing in the rain ankle-deep in cigarette butts, talking to people with yellow teeth and toxic breath?
No, the fact that romance will blossom despite bureaucracy and intolerance. The fact that like-minded people are thrown together in adversity and manage to triumph. '