Somewhere in central England, at this very moment in time, vapers are gathered together at Vapefest. It’s all about vaping and it’s a festival – us Brits love a festival. We all grow up with the option to attend festivals catering to rock, dance, alternative, world, electronic and who knows what genres of music. We love a festival.

There’s a whole host of reasons why the recent moves to limit bottle size and concentrations were a stupid thing, but we are the biggest one. Look around you, the next time you’re gathered with other vapers. Have a long hard stare. We aren’t stupid.

Do you remember 1979? Odds are that you don’t because you are either too young or, if old enough, your mind has slowly started to ebb. If you show someone my age a picture of a packet of tasty Tooty Frooties their eyes will light up and they’ll then be able to recall the great Mod revival of the time. It consisted of three songs, one of which was Time For Action by Secret Affair.

“The problem is,” they say, “that there’s not enough information out there – we simply don’t know…” and it is at this point you can cut them off. Rather than there being no research, there is so much of the stuff that it has become impossible to keep on top of it all.

Buses, revolutionary teaching techniques, a sale at a major retail chain – miss one and there’ll be another along in a short while. Didn’t manage to grab that socket set from Halfords when it was half-price? Don’t worry it’ll be on special offer again next week, such is the tedious predictability of life. Missed out on your chance to express your opinion by marking an X in a box? If you haven’t noticed it, there’s another election coming up. Hooray.

If we could be bothered to go out and buy a trophy so that we could award a trophy to public health stupidity, this week we would present it to Ireland’s Health and Information and Quality Authority (HIQA). Despite having produced a report to demonstrate the benefits of vaping, HIQA are demanding the Irish Minister of Health does not embrace vaping.

It’s not unusual for us to return to the office after the Xmas holiday to discover empty cases of champagne, three vol-au-vents in the photocopier and an inbox full of demands. Ignoring the three people who forgot everybody wasn’t at work, all of the other emails wanted to know what we thought about their year ahead.

Welcome back, everyone. We hope you had an absolutely fabulous time and wish you the very best for the year ahead. And now it’s time for us all to promise to give ourselves over to 2017’s Oscar Goldman: “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.”

Welcome to the latest in a series of instructive articles aimed at making vaping safer. It’s dangerous this vaping lark, all the newspapers say so, so we are delighted to do anything we can in order to help. Only a stupid person would ignore the risk – don’t ignore the risk.

In the running to lift the coveted “The Best Ever Worst Ecig Article in the History of Ever” award, journalists and would-be keyboard thumpers have been clambering over themselves to spout nonsense. Although disappointed not to have had at least one of the regular Stealthvape ones nominated, we felt magnanimous enough to applaud the overall winner.