Free Love @ First Site by Jane Moore

it?"
    "S'alright." He shrugs, then shifts in his chair, seeming to tire of the subject.
    I mentally prepare a quick sentence to make my job sound varied and exciting when he asks. But he doesn't.
    "Oh my God!" He's staring at the floor with an expression of abject horror.
    "What?" I look and feel alarmed, worried that a giant snake has just slithered under my chair. But Larry is staring into my handbag.
    "You smoke!" he says accusingly.
    Rather thrown by his outburst, I recoil slightly in my seat. "Um, only very occasionally. That pack is a couple of weeks old now."
    He looks at me as if I have just admitted to part-time membership in the Ku Klux Klan. "You didn't say that in your ad."
    I shrug. "I didn't know it was relevant."
    A slight sneer plays on his increasingly moist top lip. "Of
course
it's relevant, especially to someone like me. I could never have a relationship with someone who smokes."
    The temptation to stuff all fifteen or so fags in my mouth at once and light them almost overwhelms me. All I can think about is escaping from this dullard.
    Feeling and probably looking much like a battered vegetable myself, I breathe an audible sigh of relief when his food homes into view. The end is nigh. Time for a change of subject.
    "So what films have you been to see recently?" I ask cheerily. "I went to see the new Spielberg movie the other night . . . it was terrific."
    He waves his hand dismissively, a piece of battered broccoli falling onto the table. "Commercial nonsense. I don't see any point in going to the cinema unless you're going to be educated by it."
    Someone remove the butter knife before I throw myself on it. I'm about to reply that sometimes it's nice to just chill out and have fun in life, when he speaks again, his mouth full of unchewed florets.
    "I still can't believe you smoke." He shakes his head to illustrate the fact. "Do you know that every time you light a cigarette you are taking several hours off your life? And quite apart from that, your smoke when passively inhaled by others is the cause of several deaths a year."
    I know I shouldn't expend energy on rising to the bait. I know I should just agree with everything he says, promise to stop smoking and get this dirge-filled date the hell over with. But I can't.
    "My great-grandmother smoked forty fags a day, ate copious amounts of dairy, drank a tumbler of whisky every night before bed, and lived until she was ninety-seven." I look at him defiantly.
    He makes a pooh-poohing face. "A fluke. She was lucky, but just think of all those poor people she killed with her secondhand cigarette smoke."
    "Bollocks." OK, so I'm not Jeremy Paxman when it comes to debating, but it's heartfelt. "I read a report the other day that said the so-called dangers of passive smoking have been blown out of all proportion."
    "Saw it," he says flatly. "The report was commissioned by a collective from the tobacco industry, rendering it totally invalid." He flicks at a small piece of unidentifiable vegetable lodged in the corner of his mouth, making me feel quite queasy.
    "And all the reports saying it's killing innocent bystanders are probably commissioned by people like you, with an agenda to tell the rest of us how to live our lives," I reply indignantly.
    He holds his hands in the air. "Hey, if you want to kill yourself by smoking, go right ahead. Just don't kill me in the process."
    Don't tempt me, I think mutinously, fantasizing about force-feeding him the steaming, bloodied steak just being served up at the next table. What was a minor irritation on my part has now mushroomed into fist-clenching frustration at this man's infuriating sanctimony.
    He's what my father would describe as a wishy-washy liberal but, like so many of them, is anything but. Rather than fight for everyone to have a choice--surely the essence of being "liberal"?--they strut around the place telling the rest of us what we should and shouldn't do with our lives.
    He'll be telling me about the