Yes it's bad for you, but smoking does look cool — Britain's ban is Puritanical

Compare and contrast with their notional equivalents. Vapes are never cool; they have the smack of desperation about them; they signal an addict, like methadone for a heroin user. But cigarettes have the appeal of insouciance. The two cigarettes in one ashtray at the end of The Big Sleep are suggestive as nothing else would be. Or that line from These Foolish Things — “a cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces” — conjures up that evanescent thing, glamour. At the other end of the scale there was my grandfather, a muscular sailor, who smoked roll-ups from boyhood. For soldiers on a frontline, cigarettes are a necessity. David Hockney, who smokes as he works, recalls defiantly that he follows Picasso and Monet on this one.