Miles Kington: Now there's a sight you'd be unlikely to see today

I was up in London the other day, enjoying the relaxed, slow, never-get-anywhere-in-a-hurry pace of life after the helter-skelter activity of the West Country, when he should I bump into but my old friend Adrian Wardour-Street, the reigning king of public relations.

(People always think that it's Max Clifford who is the monarch of PR. This never bothers Adrian. "Max is the Clown Prince, dear boy," he says. "We're always happy for him to get the publicity. Takes the pressure off the rest off us.")

He was busy with a kind of machine which I think is called a Blackberry.

"On-line to a client?" I said.

"Hello, dear boy," he said. "Time for a quick one?"

He steered me expertly into a trendy juice bar called Tooty Frooty and ordered us a smoothy each. Then he got back to work on his Blackberry.

"I'm actually checking the result of a race in Australia," he said. "I had a few quid on a horse ... Ah! It won! Brilliant!"

And much to my surprise he pressed another knob on his Blackberry, and, slowly, five £20 notes rolled out of it.

"You can collect winnings from a Blackberry?" I said incredulously.

"You can do a lot in London that you can't do down in Herefordshire," he said.

"Wiltshire," I said.

"Whatevershire," he said. "Here, take this."

And he handed me a glass of something tasting strongly of mango and grass cuttings.

"So, what's new, Adrian?" I said.

"Look at this photograph," he said. He pulled out of his briefcase a large black-and-white photo of a crowd scene from the 1930s. A Cup Final, I would guess. There were about 30,000 people watching something intently.

"See anything odd about them?" said Adrian. "See anything you wouldn't see today?"

"Yes, they're all wearing hats."

Adrian squinted at the picture.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "So they are. No, it's not that."

"They've all got their hands in their pockets."

"No."

"They're all men. There are no women."

"No."

"I give up."

"They're all smoking!" said Adrian triumphantly.

And by and large it was true. Most of the men had little stubs stuck in their mouths, and were puffing away. It reminded me of a picture I had recently seen of two 1930s French film stars, on the beach at Biarritz, going jogging. One of them had been smoking, even while jogging! Autres temps, autres moeurs.

"Autres temps, autres moeurs," I said.

"Arsenal v. Aston Villa, actually," said Adrian. "The point is, it takes us back to a golden age when people could still smoke wherever they wanted and when cigarettes were still glamorous."

Enlightenment dawned on me.

"I get it," I said. "You've been hired by the tobacco industry to mount a fight back! It's backlash time for the ciggy people! They want you to make it seem desirable again!"

"Something like that," said Adrian vaguely. Just then some Eastern music sounded and he pulled out a mobile.

"Osama!" said Adrian. "Thanks for ringing back! Tell you what, Osama, old boy. You're breaking up a bit. Could you step out of the cave a bit ...? That's better!"

He listened for a bit.

"No, it's all going well," said Adrian. "Everyone loved your new pictures. They all noticed that you had begun to dye your beard and look younger. It's really going to work!"

He nodded for a while, as if agreeing with his invisible client. Odd, I thought, how we still use body language for someone 4,000 miles away who can't see us.

"Look," said Adrian, "I've got another idea. In your next video, or whatever you've got lined up, could we see you smoking? It's probably years since you've smoked, but it would mean a great deal to me personally ... Osama! I am being serious! This is very important to me . . !"

I left him to it.

But I can't wait to see if there is ash sprinkled all over his new dark beard in Osama's next photo-shoot.