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• Simon Gray has lung cancer but won't stop smoking 

The Last Cigarette, Simon Gray's memoir about giving up smoking - or, rather, musing about one day quitting since by page 243 his ashtray still overfloweth - ends with an arresting postscript. "I have a tumour in my lung... absolutely certainly, one way or another, I'm coming up to the last cigarette." There is a burning inevitability, of course, that a habit begun aged 7, pursued tirelessly, heroically even, through past health horrors including aneurysms and prostate cancer, peaking at 65 fags a day, would get him in the end.

Still, those of us who loved Gray's previous two volumes of The Smoking Diaries for their comic shambling and twinkling self-deprecation had hoped that he might, after all, prove the fag packet warnings wrong. At least now after radiotherapy, with more next month for a secondary tumour on his neck, Gray has finally given up trying to give up.

"I don't think I'd survive long without smoking," he says. "I think I'm an addictive personality. And that is my addiction. I don't think anything can replace smoking." Besides, he now fears that quitting itself might kill him: a film director friend attributes a recent heart attack to packing in after a lifetime. . . .

I expect him to eulogise about cigarettes, the rituals and paraphernalia. Instead Gray sees smoking as as much a weakness as a pleasure. He can understand the smoking ban, just wishes it was less authoritarian, permitted, perhaps, at certain fag-friendly restaurants. But he has controlled his own habit enough to get through dinner without sparking up on pavements. "At times I'm very grateful for cigarettes. It means one's life is run on a system of small rewards. You feel that you've earned a cigarette."

He regrets, however, that he has passed his habit down to his two children, both in their forties

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