IT is not hard to become jaded and pessimistic when you listen to the stories thrust upon us by the media. Before you know it you are convinced that you are going to be murdered in your bed by a gang of youths who have been driven mad by food additives and suffering from sunstroke as a result of global warming caused by your 4x4.

That is if you have a bed and a home left after losing all of your money in sub-primes, whatever they are. All this in a world where things are not quite what they used to be.

Sometimes you just have to think about things a little differently, and look for the positive signs. People have been complaining in writing about things going downhill since at least the times of the Roman Empire, and it's reasonable to assume that they have been doing so verbally since the beginnings of speech.

But there is a greatness of human spirit within us all, which I was reminded of recently in the most unlikely of places.

The marketplace bar in our local village is not the best bar in the world. It is not even the best bar in the village. If you were trying to sell it you would struggle after extolling the virtues of its pool table and the easy-to-clean nature of the expanses of Formica. It is fair to say that it has seen better days, as have most of its clients. On the face of it, an unlikely place to receive a life-affirming jolt - and not from the bottom of an empty beer glass, but from a pair of tar-wrecked smoker's lungs.

Since the beginning of January smoking has been banned in all bars. No exceptions, full stop, and a hefty fine if the gendarmes catch you. But there we were, a Saturday night, and our fellow customers were happily puffing away as if nothing had ever changed.

I can't say that I would generally be very happy about somebody smoking next to me. Going home smelling like a bonfire has limited attractions, but this time I was delighted. These guys were doing something noble, flying in the face of fashion, health sense and the law. They were defiantly sticking two fingers up at the all-powerful state and declaring their right to do as they pleased.

It was a somewhat futile gesture, rather like pandas protesting about bamboo forest clearance. Smokers are irrevocably condemned to extinction; lung cancer and legislation will kill them off as surely as the Chinese population will squeeze out the pandas. But that doesn't mean that you have to take things lying down. Good on those puffing, wheezing, smelly old smokers - they are keeping alive the spirit of revolution that made this country what it is today.

A country is made by its laws, but individuals are made by their complete and utter disregard for the law. Pass me a Gaulloise, I'm in the mood for revolution.