Smokers know that they are addicted to cigarettes. But it doesn’t feel like an addiction until they try to stop. Smokers know too that succumbing to an addiction does not advance man as a species on the evolutionary scale. They know their lungs are dripping with slag and every cigarette is a nail in their coffin. They feel the sting of the polite sign in the doctor’s waiting room – ‘No Smoking’- and the cancer advertisement in the train – ‘Kiss a non-smoker today – enjoy the difference’.

Thus the segregation begins. Smokers smell distinctly of nicotine which they cannot smell themselves because, as any non-smoker will tell them, tobacco dulls the senses. They have two or more orange fingers and the occasional orange tooth. Smokers who started young are stunted.

But it is everybody’s business because cigarette smoke, as a pretty cloud, floats unerringly to the nearest non-smoker, whose lungs are innocent of smoke. Nature, in her wisdom, abhors a vacuum.

Time pacifies them, and they become non-smokers, but always they are divided by two emotions; a yearning for their dear dead friend, the cigarette;  and pride that they mastered their killer, the cigarette. Why don’t they all, without exception, die of heart or lung failure at 35 years of age? Why do some smokers live long, full, rich, healthy lives? Is there any justice?

Running, there seems little doubt, is going to be one of the growth industries of the 1980’s. now that’s bad news, if your idea of an extremely active morning is breaking into a shuffle on your way to the letterbox for the paper.

Because of there’s one thing runners, or joggers, enjoy as much as panting themselves into a state of near cardiac arrest it’s telling other people about how much fun they’re having.

They’ll also tell you how their fitness is improved, how their chanes of living longer are much better, and, if you don’t walk away quickly, go intu lurid details about the state of their arteries, the lack of fat on the pipes into their heart, and the dramatic improvement in their love life.

What has to be understood about the average jogger is that he or she rapidly becomes a fanatic.

Now the most fanatics can be easily recognized. They’re the clean-cut young couple on your doorstep, quizzing you on your knowledge of the bible. Or they’re the people with the shaven heads and paint on their face, ringing bells and dancing in the middle of the city.

But your fanatical jogger is much more difficult to pick. Certainly a person with the build of a greyhound standing on its hid legs, and a sweatshirt with a German brand name over the heart, can be fairly easily identified as a running freak.