"As long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety."

Fancy historical quotes are, obviously, the last refuge of the desperate pariah, but the way that the smoking ban - from which England is 10 days away, has gained almost universal assent does remind me of this line from Alexis de Tocqueville, writing on American democracy in the 18th century.

In the first place, when the ban became law last year, there was the very strange fashion in which what had looked like a knife-edge vote became, at the division, an overwhelming mandate. What persuaded the old Labour diehards who know that it's an essential crutch for the seriously downtrodden - for the underclass, for prisoners, for psychiatric patients - to abandon their defence of smokers at the last minute remains beyond me.

What's even stranger is the supine willingness of smokers themselves to agree with the legislation. The virulent impatience of the cleanly, non-smoking bourgeois for the faintest whiff of a distant cigarette is something we've all got used to in recent years. But for vocational smokers like myself to fall in line with the prejudices of the middle-class, proscriptive health advocates strikes me as distinctly creepy.

A lot of people who, like me, have hitherto been keen smokers have suddenly started telling me that they are glad the government is stepping in to discipline them. These are people who were until recently aware enough of their own pleasure centres to know that the act of smoking can be, and often is, so much more than feeding a greedy addiction. It does relieve stress; it does deepen the pleasure of a sociable evening, as it relieves the alienation of a lonely one; it does help you think.

(I think of it as a cheapo version of Buddhism's mindfulness of breathing, drawing you away from abstraction to remind you of your breath and body. I am aware this is a minority opinion. But there is legit scientific research showing that nicotine arrests the advance of Alzheimer's).

And it just does make the frictions of social life go better. Imagine Britain getting through the second world war without snouts: I remember my grandmother (who lived well beyond 90, I may add) telling me that when a bomb smashed a crater in her garden, leaving every window in the house shattered and her two young children in a state of high distress, the first thing she did the following morning was to go out and buy a carton of 100 Player's Navy Cut. She smoked them all that day. It was, she told me, the only thing that kept her sane, and I didn't find it hard to believe her.

As a child, I remember her arriving in her house in a permanent fug of Chanel No 5 and Embassy No 1s, and ever since the smell of fresh tobacco smoke has been for me the perfume of conviviality. I think many other people feel like this, too. Perhaps that's why - until July - so many non-smokers smoke in the pub.

Good health is not a simple recipe that works for everyone. At different times in almost everyone's life, we will resort to what might seem "unhealthy" practices to those not undergoing the same pressures. We drink, we eat bad but consoling food. (Guess what's next on the government's health agenda.) And it gets us through - possibly at the cost of our subsequent life expectancy ... but some smokers live long lives and as Bill Hicks so wisely pointed out, non-smokers die every day.

The people under the most pressure in our society are the poorest. Just getting by as a very poor person is hard and expensive work (see Polly Toynbee's book, Hard Work), and you do it in the face of contempt from the comfortably off. And of course, these are the people who, overwhelmingly, still want - need - to smoke, as they want to eat bad food and drink.

But in our "classless" society, those at the bottom are in the minority. And so, they now have to contend with another unfair sanction. It's what de Tocqueville called the Tyranny of the Majority.

I've got no excuse, of course. I just really like it.