Outdoor smoking ban has generated inevitable backlash - but it's about far more than the health of racecourse finances

When I think of smoking bans, my mind automatically goes back to the nonsenses of my youth that were once an undebated part of normal life yet now seem so ludicrous as to provoke bewilderment.

It's virtually impossible, for example, to convince a young person that people were once allowed to drive cars while not wearing a seatbelt, on the grounds that the right to have oneself hurled through a glass windscreen or into the head of the passenger in front was something worth fighting for.

Likewise, it's a struggle to make the youth accept that you could light up a ciggie in a sealed metal tube containing thousands of gallons of aviation fuel at 30,000 feet, and nobody could so much as tut their disapproval.