Emma Dent on staying away from cigarettes

As a bus traveller, I managed to bypass them altogether, but in the process unfortunately lost my chance to get one of those cute furry things you can put on your computer screen that the campaigners were handing out.

In their bid to make the neighbourhood smoke free, the PCT may have a battle on its hands. The local high street still seems liberally sprinkled with smokers. It is well supplied with pubs, too, meaning of course that the folk who used to spend all day drinking and smoking at the bar now spend all day drinking and smoking on the pavement.

As an ex-smoker, I of course like to take the moral high ground and find all this mildly repugnant. One of my top bugbears is having clouds of smoke blown over me by a person walking in front, a particular problem when you live in an area where most people who smoke seem to smoke cigarettes that are part tobacco, part tar and part something else that smells truly foul.

It is coming up to three years since I gave up cigarettes, a record blighted only by occasional lapses at weddings, the HSJ Awards and the work Christmas do. Basically the danger zone is any occasion where large numbers of people are enjoying themselves with the help of paid-for booze, which may be more of a comment on my social life than anything else.

It makes a huge difference to have hardly any friends who smoke - in fact, thinking about it, not a single friend who I see regularly smokes and most never have done. And living in a smoke-free household means I cannot get tempted at home. What clean-living people I must know, I hear you cry - we will leave to one side for the moment their diets and capacity for drink.

At the last count I am going to three weddings this year, at least two of which promise gallons of champagne and one of which is in Scotland, so we can forget about any pretence of healthy living there (only joking). My capacity to be fag free will be tested like never before - wish me luck.