THERE’S no doubt about it – I’m getting more intolerant as I get older. My patience is growing thinner in all sorts of areas, ranging from annoyingly catchy mobile ring tones to almost every aspect of public life in Britain.

However, it appears not all these intolerances are due to the increasing brittleness of my personality. One, I reckon, is down to a change in the law.

I’ve mentioned previously how since it was made illegal to smoke in certain public places, notably pubs and restaurants, my lungs have acquired an absolute antipathy to cigarettes. Though a lifelong non-smoker – all right, I have had the odd cig on very late nights, but you could count the total on the fingers of two hands – I got used to passively absorbing others’ smoke, the way people did in the days before the smoking ban.

But now lighting up in enclosed public places is against the law, my lungs have got used to all that clean air, and have acquired a remarkable sensitivity to the acrid aroma of someone else’s cigarettes.

Only the other day I had to accelerate to nip round a smoker I was downwind of on a York street, only to find I had rushed headlong into the ambush of a plume from another addict lurking away to my right – the cunning fiends!

So I guess I should be pleased to hear that in New York civic leaders have approved a ban on smoking in the open air, in places including public parks and even Times Square. Since the clean wind of change often blows from across the Atlantic, it’s a fair bet similar measures will be considered in old York sooner rather than later, thus solving my problem.

But would I really welcome it? My lungs certainly would, but I find a number of objections bubbling up inside, and not just about the practicality of enforcing such a ban – such as creating yet more smokers’ ghettoes wherever the prohibition didn’t hold sway.

Perhaps more importantly, how far should we go in banning one person’s habit which another person happens to find antisocial, or even harmful?

The comedian Russell Howard – one of the many performers from Mock The Week whose attraction palls when you get more than a bite-sized chunk of his particular wacky world of humour – went up in my estimation by comparing York on a raceday evening to Tolkien’s evil realm of Mordor, stating a view many residents share but rarely express publicly.

So what are we going to do – ban York Races or, more seriously, ban or seriously restrict booze sales? While smoking and drinking are not directly comparable health hazards (I’m thinking particularly of passive smoking), alcohol does all sorts of demonstrable harm, with more than a million booze-related NHS admissions in 2009-10. Yet we shy away from serious restrictions on its supply and use.

Motor vehicles also have harmful effects, and some very vociferous folk would like to ban or severely restrict them, but our society and economy remain heavily based on an assumption that lots of people will have access to private cars.

Oh, and while I’m at it, another reason I have an issue with all these prohibitions is that I’m increasingly intolerant of banning things by sneaky little instalments.

If what people ultimately want is to completely outlaw smoking – or cars, alcohol or race-goers – then let’s say so, openly and plainly, with agendas on open view, have a proper (and no doubt acrimonious) debate, sort out how it would work, then do it or not.

Let’s have a ban on people trying to chip away at the things they don’t like in the hope of wiping them out before anyone notices.

Meanwhile, if you see an agitated man trying to sidestep smokers in the street, please be tolerant of him; he just needs a change of air.