TWO letters were recently published about smoking. The first letter I agreed with – why are they covering up cigarettes in shops but not alcohol?

I gave up after non-smoking or alcohol-related heart surgery six years ago after almost 40 years of pleasure and enjoyment.

I still miss both, and when queueing up to buy my Daily Echo, I still look longingly at them displaying their charms and tempting me with come-hither attraction.

But like the first correspondent said, both are of equal evil, so why don't they cover up both?

Well, much as we love those Miss Marple and Poirot TV dramas from an era where either or both were socially acceptable, smoking seems to have been given the ‘bad-boy’ image because everyone has to share the smoke, whereas the alcohol only affects the person drinking it.

Yes, but which is the lesser of the two evils? There is no breathalyser for smoking cigarettes, and we don't have nicotine louts or binge smoking. Has anyone ever been arrested for either? No, I don't think so. (Yet correspondent two dealt with smoking litter, which is just a 21st Century Orwellian fine instead of employing street cleaners).

So, clearly, the booze in reality is the real bad-boy when the pros and cons are weighed up. Yet you will notice in every supermarket without exception, that more alcohol is displayed than any other product.

And much as I yet again hark back to the old days when the only places selling alcohol were off-licences, and recycling was tuppence deposit on the bottle, during and after the two World Wars, we were actively encouraged to smoke to curb the appetite.

Ah, so now we have an answer to the obesity problem, don’t be obese, smoke cigarettes. And so we have the third topic on our governmental triage of mega-taxation – obesity. Recently, they announced a tax on fatty foods, (are they going to hide those as well?), but if they sell less calories, less cigarettes and less alcohol, where will their revenue come from? I shudder to think.

ALAN BURRIDGE, Blandford Road, Upton, Poole