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When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s it was commonplace to come back from a café with your clothes smelling of smoke. I didn’t think twice about it. Movie stars, TV celebrities smoking looked, to my eyes, really cool and adverts for this lifestyle choice were everywhere. It was simply normal.

The House of Commons took the first step this week in making the sale of cigarettes illegal. Someone who is 15 today, if the Bill runs its course, will never be able to buy a packet of cigarettes legally. Cigarettes will go from being ubiquitous to invisible in just a few decades. It’s a big cultural change.

And legislation is one of the instruments that a democratic society has to make such change. But I was reminded again, as I listened to the debate, that just as influential on the way we live, as legal and economic arrangements – the business of government -are the stories we tell, the songs we sing, the myths we share, the images we carry of ourselves and the dearest hopes we have for the future. It’s said that at the beginning of the smoking craze in England, after tobacco arrived along with potatoes in the 1580s, it was the image of the pipe smoking adventurers that made tobacco attractive. What made it even more appealing was perhaps that the church said it was sinful and banned it. The King, James I, wrote that smoking was a ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and …… nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless’. He thus associated it with hell. Those living with lung cancer or grieving the loss of a loved one who smoked wouldn’t disagree.

At the heart of the story of smoking, along with the policy discussions and public health arguments, is a thoroughly recognisable struggle. The expectation that we will live in a way that’s good for us and others, while all the time behaving in ways we know just isn’t. St Paul put it succinctly: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

At the heart of the story of smoking is human contradiction, sometimes contrariness, sometimes flat out addiction but along the way, a battle of wills that goes to the heart of what it is to be human. For some it is smoking, for others it will be something else. Caught between desire, regret, stubbornness and need: Smoking, its endorsement and suppression; is a parable for our time.

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