SPRING has finally sprung – if you believe the clock change and at least one really summery day last week are enough to signify that the seasons have moved on.

The effects were however instantaneous.

People are back sitting outside pubs so they can smoke and drink at the same time – and thus also stop non-smokers who don’t want to inhale their fumes from enjoying a pint in fresh air.

It does seem strange that during the summer months we now have a situation where at many pubs where the only escape for healthy types is to sit in the semi-darkness indoors.

Come the autumn you’ll be able to tell the drinkers who don’t smoke. They’ll be the pale ones while the smokers will be the ones with colour in their cheeks, a combination of exposure to sun and high blood pressure caused by the tobacco.

On the same subject three cheers for the British Medical Association in Wales who last week called for smoking to be banned in the grounds of hospitals throughout the principality.

There can be few things more incongruous than turning up at a hospital and having to battle your way to the entrance through large numbers of patients gathered outside in pyjamas wheezing their way through cigarettes.

It’s almost as if they are deliberately trying to counteract all the work being done to try to get them back to good health. The BMA move is opposed of course by Forest, the organisation which lobbies for so-called “smokers’ rights.” By the way, what about the rights of the rest of us to expect all who profit from the tobacco industry to pay for the NHS costs of treating its many, many victims?

Anyway Forest says hospitals are stressful places for those being treated or visiting and people should be allowed to smoke in their grounds for that reason.

But smoking doesn’t relieve stress, it merely postpones it for a few years or decades until you suffer all those diseases directly attributable to the habit.

Although it has to be said that those who still persist in smoking, in these days of supposedly prohibitively-high tobacco taxes and the most shocking campaigns the advertising industry can think up, are unlikely to be deterred by a ban that extends to hospital grounds.

Such a ban already exists in parts of Australia and I vividly remember two years ago when my wife and I rushed to the Sydney hospital where our daughter had just given birth to our first grandchild.

It was 9pm at night and as our cab pulled up on a busy main road we had to negotiate our way in the darkness along a pavement lined with men and women dressed in white patients’ gowns.

Many also had six foot metal drip stands and tubes going into their arms. And they were all dragging on cigarettes as if their very lives depended on it.