Inside the Coach and Horses, in the middle of Soho, they're having the last night of smoking, ever. Because that's precisely what we need, in Britain, tonight, the last wet June night of the wettest June ever. Less fun, and fewer freedoms. The mood is mixed. Resigned, mainly. Jeff and Mike and Archie will just go outside. 'Probably for the best,' says Archie. 'Not a worry for me.'

To my right, a man sharing an ashtray begins to argue. Film-maker Aaron Greenwood has come here from Cambridge, just for this night. 'This seemed the place to be. Everyone came here. Francis Bacon. Peter Cook. Jeffrey Bernard.' Yes they did, and the tawdry glamour and the cleverness associated with them all would never have been quite the same without a cigarette. It quietly denoted, surely, freedom to do what they did. And a certain odd sexiness. Of all the quotes about cigarettes, Bernard's 'Girls who are very difficult to get into bed usually don't smoke' rings many bells with smokers, male and female. Even though cigarettes took his leg.

But of all the things written about the 'glamour' of cigarettes, many of them have been written by people who don't, actually, smoke. Film glamorises cigarettes: but film glamorises everything. They are nasty little weeds, and smokers - the first 10 smokers here I speak to all admit this - quietly, sometimes, hate them.

But this ban, is surely, not about cigarettes. It is about freedom, and intelligent choices. My phone rings. It is Joe Jackson, returning a call, from Berlin. The singer/songwriter, as eloquent a defender of smoking as he is with his lyrics - and he only ever smokes (American Spirit, and the occasional cigar) when he's drinking - is livid. 'You can actually forget your civil liberties argument,' he says. 'It's been lost. My case is and always has been that there is no evidence for the dangers of passive smoking. None. Nothing proven, ever. I do not, will not, understand why people have fallen for the fear.'

There are, every smoker here admits, (here and in the French House and in two private clubs around the corner) good reasons for smokers not to smoke in front of non-smokers. It can smell, in restaurants. It can be rude, in a stranger's front room. All of them try not to. All of them have now had that freedom of courtesy curtailed. But - bars? As Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal wrote at the time of the New York ban: '[They are banning it] in bars, the last public place you can go to be a dropout, a nonconformist, refusenik, a time-waster, a bohemian, a hider from reality, a bum, a rebel, a bore, a heathen.'

Suddenly, years too late, it hits me. There has been a fundamental misreading here. The reason smoking is being banned in pubs is because they are 'workplaces'. But, actually, they're not. They are almost precisely the opposite. They are the places where people come to get 'away' from work. How did we, other than by being lazily inured by nanny-batter, and suffering fervid guilt from our habit, miss this point? But miss it we did. And so we step outside. And so we say goodnight. And so we say goodbye: but not even a happy Pete 'n' Dud goodbye: the very worst kind of goodbye, to any relationship; the kind where there is no real reason to have done so other than momentum and a very modern fear of fighting for happiness.

The Facts

· Shortly after the Second World War 80 per cent of men smoked. Today, about 24 per cent of the population continues to enjoy lighting up. Dramatic falls were seen in the Seventies and Eighties, but the rate of quitting has slowed to 0.4 per cent a year

· The government's wants just 17 per cent of Britons to be smoking by 2010

· The UK-wide smoking ban does not apply to three places: Alderney, Sark and the Isle of Man

· Smoking will also still be allowed in prisons, army barracks and care institutions

· 600,000 of Britain's 10 million smokers will give up as a result of the ban, the government believes

· Age reduces addiction to nicotine. One third of 20- to 24-year-olds smoke, but just one in seven people over 60 do

· The Treasury takes over £4 of the typical £5.50 cost of a packet of 20 cigarettes in tax, and makes about £8bn a year from smokers

· It costs the NHS an estimated £1.5bn a year to treat smokers made ill by their habit

· Smoking kills about 100,000 Britons a year through cancer, lung conditions and heart problems. About 1,000 people a day are admitted to hospital in England with a smoking-related illness