I can’t look at a keyboard without tasting the tarry, sweet tobacco of a Players Navy Cut on my lips, or feeling the stinging sensation of blue tobacco smoke in the eyes.

The smoke, the rat-tat-tat of the manual typewriter, the clattering of telex machines; it was a heady mix of the journalism of my generation.

A journalist without a cigarette dangling from his or her lips, or a smoking fag in an overflowing ashtray, was missing a part of equipment as vital as the shorthand notebook or the pocketful of small change for public phones.

My wife saw a 1960s film featuring a newsroom recently and remarked, critically, what a strange sight it was to see all those people smoking. It was not the time to remind her that she used to smoke once and it was the sight of her sitting in a corner of the BBC World Service newsroom in London, rolling a cigarette, which first attracted me to her.

She wasn’t rolling the rich cigar leaves on her thighs like the Cuban woman of my dreams at the time, but the sight of thin rolls of tobacco between her delicate fingers, and a genteel lick along the sticky edge of the paper, was enough to send me and the newsreaders and translators from the Latin American section into raptures on hot summer evenings during the night shift.

Only an Australian woman, I thought at the time, would roll their own and it was a disappointment on our first date that she didn’t sink six pints of Fosters, but preferred a chardonnay.

Most people are social smokers, smoking with a drink in a restaurant or bar, or at a party.

But journalists fell into a work-related category of smoker who believed nicotine was an essential part of the creative process.

Such an attitude came with hazards. I’ve lost count of the number of fires my colleagues started – not with discarded cigarettes, but with cigarettes left to burn on window sills, on desks after falling out of ashtrays, or cigarettes rolling onto carpets at the height of inspiration, writing the perfect introduction, or “intro”, to the perfect story.

Banished from the office

I can remember being banished from the sub-editors’ office of my first newspaper, the Surrey Advertiser in Britain – where I had been invited to learn the noble art of sub-editing in the hope of improving my writing – after tossing a lighted match into a wastepaper bin and burning the chief sub-editor’s backside.

And at the Guildford Technical College where I attended a day-release journalism course, there was a special, if unofficial, dispensation to allow the teenage journalists to smoke.

The fix of nicotine, along with strong coffee, was not the only attraction of smoking. There was a ritual involved: tapping an untipped cigarette on a desk so flakes of tobacco would not lodge in the mouth, twiddling the fingers to make a rolly, wiping the yellow nicotine from a sweaty brow in composing an intro, or tossing a stub-end from a window and watching it spiral down to the pavement in a shower of sparks and embers.

I arrived at the tail-end of the pipe-smokers and they had a ritual all of their own which extended to visiting specialist shops which were always called “The Smoker’s Corner” and ordering a mix of tobaccos from pots on shelves, that always had honey or rum written on the label.

I even tried a pipe myself, a modern job with a metal stem which grew unbelievably hot and burned my tongue. My flirtation with the pipe ended when I placed a lighted pipe in my pocket, hung up my jacket and set off the fire sprinklers in the office.

And the end of the smoking affair came when my roll-up wife discovered she was pregnant, and discovered the term passive smoking.

These days I’m reduced to the occasional cigar which I smoke surreptitiously at the end of the garden, while pretending to watch the birds. I have to make sure I’m down wind of the house and as part of the modern ritual I gently peel the price tag from the box in the event of my wife finding it, and discovering how much these things actually cost.

But, cornered in the garden, I will always maintain smoking is the best habit or addiction there is. It’s just such a shame it kills you.

Don Knowler, apart from being On The Wing Mercury columnist, is a journalism Legend…