LETTER: Fired up about smoking

HESTER Lacey's article "The smoker's last gasp" (Real Life, 5 November) is quite perversely remarkable: she manages to avoid mentioning why people hate others smoking in public. When someone smokes a cigarette in the vicinity of anyone else, then everybody breathes in the smoke. This is not just annoying, it is literally sickening and in extreme cases lethal.

So to speak of being "reasonable" and "respecting the rights" of smokers is to play the game by the rules of the tobacco companies, deliberately or otherwise.I have no objection to someone lighting up provided they absorb every single molecule of smoke from their cigarette.

Frank Desmond

Twickenham, Middlesex