Do you remember when ole whatisface started vaping at some award ceremony for Americans? How about her, that singer nobody has heard of, when she created mayhem in the States because she vape…oh, let’s face it, nobody cares. Nobody on this side of the Atlantic knows who these celebrities are or what they do. In the United Kingdom, if tabloids and TV scheduling are to be believed, we care about one thing: shallow young people fumbling and frotting with each other on a tropical island.

By the end of this year there will be 2.2 billion people playing video games. They will have spent £0.9 billion over the twelve months on disks and downloads. But gamers have been getting more than just some software to play with, and this has serious ramifications for vapers and tobacco harm reduction. Is vaping Doomed?

The Tobacco Products Directive is like explaining the rules of cricket: The TPD is not the TPD, the old TPD was the TPD before it became the TPD 1. The TPD that isn’t the TPD is actually the TPD 2 because the TPD 1 came and went. Like a band’s difficult second album, TPD1 was rewritten and managed to include more scientific inaccuracies than the film 2012.

It was the summer of ’69, but I didn’t know anybody with a porch. “Oh, and when you held my hand – I knew that it was now or never,” sang Bryan Adams. Someone was holding my hand, it was the ambulance lady, and blood was cascading down my face. David Somebodyorother was in too much of a hurry to get out to play, Thatcher hadn’t got her act together, and my face was shoved into a crate of milk bottles.

We were there, and it just goes to show the bias in the media that you know nothing about it. We were there with the Beckhams, the Foos and the Biffy Sheeran. They all lied, it wasn’t Corby crowds – they were there for Stealthvape and we have the pictures to prove it. Yes, we were definitely at Glastonbury. Honest.

In the 70s, if you were lucky, MI5 would mark you out to be something of a wrong’un and make a folder with your name on the top, with Letraset or a Dymo label maker. Men in hats would hang out near lampposts, black cars would speed off the second you approached them, and Alexei Sayle’s parents would pop round for dinner parties. That’s how people kept tabs on you in the 70s – unless you’d put a Blue Peter time capsule (all about you) in the back garden.

Following on from last week’s article, it’s clear from the bulging sack the postman showed us that thousands of you agree with our plan to push for TPD III. TPD II is so riven with problems that a brand new approach appears to be the only way forward.

Here it comes, the absolute end of the beginning. Here it comes, the Tobacco Products Directive. What was once spoken about, campaigned against and caused at least one petition a week to be drawn up faded from public debate. In fact, it’s been so long since many have openly discussed it that a sizeable number of people are totally ignorant about it and what it might mean to them.