7 MAY 2005, Page 57

Q. While taking a mid-morning walk near a local school,

I was confronted by half a dozen teenaged girls wielding cigarettes and asking for a light, please? I was uncertain whether to make a hostile report to the head, bearing in mind time spent in my own school bicycle-shed, or to respond to the request by telling them they were all shortening their lives and heading for cancer, or to ignore them disapprovingly and continue my walk. (NB: I was smoking my pipe.) I wondered which course of action you would recommend.

E.D., Bristol A. You should do unto others as you would be done by — no doubt you wish no one had ever given you your first light — so you should have turned the teenagers down, explaining this factor and adding, ‘Besides, assisted suicide is against the law in this country.’