Okay, Fayt, maybe I should have clarified. Your post didn't offend me, it just annoyed me.

Now. I understand that smoking is a stupid habit, and that it is bad. But you're forgetting my age, and a very important part of my post.

I am 19, and I have been smoking for 3 and a half years. I am determined that I will stop before I am 26, because when I reach that age I'll have been smoking for ten years in a row, and that's just horrible. If I stop before I've been at it for 10 years, which is such a long time, my body may be able to curb back some of the negative effects before my body gets too old to recover from them.

I was on the phone to my mother the other night, and we ended up talking about smoking. Turns out she's been smoking for 32 years. That's thirty-two. That's three decades! Her mother, my grandmother, died of emphysema when she was 63; I made it clear that I don't want that end for my mother, and that I want her to stop. She's too old for it now, and she has to realise that. Well, she doesn't have to. I'd just really, really like her to. She's tried a few times before, but she's never really wanted it, so now myself, my brother, and her partner are trying to get her to want to quit.

I don't think that smoking is a life-long right. When I'm older, I might want a family; I could never, ever, ever light up while pregnant, so assuming that I do have a child one day smoking is already a passing thing. The risks of heart problems, blood problems, skin problems will all increase exponentially as I leave behind my youth and settle into adulthood. I know this, and I'll stop before it happens. Hell, I'm 20 in June, and that scares me enough; I don't want to make ageing any scarier for myself. I dread being all saggy. Ew.

But for now, I'm 19, so smoking (while a bad choice) isn't immediately killing me. Moreover, I have decided in myself that smoking is to be a thing I can only indulge in while I'm still young.

Telling a smoker that they should stop smoking is nigh-on impossible to do without pissing them off, because whichever way you choose to do it they'll get pissed off, and at the base of it you're always telling them what to do. British smokers, like me, are particularly defensive because of how our government works. Alcohol is destroying this country; and yet the government rails against tobacco (tax revenue from which more or less keeps the NHS afloat (we're charged 75% tax on all tobacco products)) like it really is the root of all evil. There are adverts on the TV, billboards, pages in magazines, that make smokers out to be these abhorrent junkies who spend their time finding children to blow smoke into the faces of. And yet, they never really make an effort to tell people not to drink. When was the last time someone said, 'Oh, sorry, I wouldn't normally fight with the guy but I'd had one too many cigs, know what I mean?' or the last time someone rammed their car into a family because they had too much nicotine in their system?

I appreciate what you were trying to do, Fayt, but at the end of the day you're a kid. I don't mean you any offence by that. Every kid, except ones who think its cool because their older siblings do it, hates smoking. I did, because I got told how crap it was in class all the time. I'm not saying you'll end up smoking, because you don't seem that way. But maybe with time you'll come to understand why, when life doesn't turn out quite how you'd planned, just wanting to do something is more than enough.