SOME of my earliest childhood memories are of sitting in a car with the windows shut and smoke blowing over me making me nauseous, distressed and angry.

During the evening before my wedding day I booked a table at the Chinese restaurant in Pocklington. As my preference is to eat in a non-smoking section, I asked whether they had one and was informed that they did.

To cut a long story short, the manager informed the smokers at the next table that it was fine for them to smoke.

From the time I can remember I have had to put up with people smoking in cars, in lifts, in buses, in theatres, in cinemas. In any nook and cranny they could.

I am less concerned about the medical damage it does to smokers and more concerned about the damage of passive smoking and, even more, to the social inconvenience that it causes (not least the awful smell).

Smokers have been reluctant in the past to accept any sort of boundaries about where they can smoke. Smokers have been far more concerned to thrust their liberty up our noses. They have expected us to put up with it.

Now the tables are turning and they do not like it. Now they want compromise rather than policy, education rather than legislation, negotiation rather than restrictions.

Personally, I have lived for the time when I do not have to request the air to breath but can enforce it. I do believe that people have the right to smoke, but not over me, over children and over vulnerable people not able to say no. My rights are as important as those of smokers.

Janine M MacKenzie,

Dorrington Close,

Pocklington.

Updated: 10:02 Saturday, March 04, 2006