The closing date for the Government consultation on ‘Smoke-free, heated tobacco-free and vape-free places in England’ is this Friday (May 8).

I know many of you are sceptical about ‘public’ consultations, and I’m with you on that. Nevertheless …

An article about smoking has caused a bit of a stink (no pun intended).

Written by Xochitl Gonzalez, a New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, it was published last week by The Cut, an online magazine that is part of New York Magazine.

I was on BBC Radio Ulster this morning talking to Stephen Nolan about the generational tobacco ban.

Nolan is one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters and after introducing me he said, “There’s something in my head I’ve been talking to you for about 20 years. Have you been around a long time?”.

The Times reports that Chapel Down sold a million bottles of English sparkling wine ‘for the first time last year’ and hopes to capture ‘1 per cent of the global champagne market by 2035’.

I can’t remember when I first discovered Chapel Down wines but my interest in English wines began about ten years ago.

It was announced today that the Tobacco and Vapes Bill has received Royal Assent and become law.

The Press Association reported the story by leading with a quote from Rishi Sunak, the former Conservative prime minister who introduced the idea of a generational ban in the UK in October 2023.

Further to my previous post, I thought I was being interviewed by World Radio News for a rather longer feature, but I was wrong.

Instead it was a four-minute report on a 30-minute news podcast so my 20-minute ‘interview’ was edited to a soundbite of less than 20 seconds!

I was interviewed by World Radio News last night.

No, I’d never heard of it either, but the US-based operation describes itself as a ‘news organization producing Biblically sound, daily coverage of global, national, and cultural current events’.

It frustrates me that many people are only just waking up to the generational tobacco sales ban.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have criticised the policy – on social media and in print – since the Tobacco and Vapes Bill concluded its passage through parliament last week, following which there was an unexpected flurry of media reports.