Letter: Puffed up

POOR, deluded Elizabeth Heathcote won't be fooling any hardened smokers with her fantasies about why she smokes ("Never gonna give you up", Real Life, 6 December) and when she'll give up for ever.

"That's me!" she cries, looking at the "hip and jaunty" woman with the Marlboro Light. I was saying the same thing 10 years ago. I'm still smoking the Marlboro Lights, but the hipness and jauntiness have long since been cremated (alongside the pounds 10,000 I spent to achieve that hip and jaunty image). "Smokers are the people I want to be - poets and fighters, not lawyers or accountants." Speaking as a puffing lawyer, I'd say we nevertheless share one thing: addiction. A junkie is a junkie. A fag hanging out of your mouth is a passport to the cemetery, not the Bohemian life.

HELEN KING

Altrincham, Cheshire