By next year cigarettes will probably come in plain packets if a House of Commons vote is successful. The aim is to deter children from starting smoking.

All those sophisticated cartons of the past will be gone as Parliament attempts to remove the glamour from nicotine addiction. “It’s a strange old world,” said my mate Kev the Sparky. “I grew up when kids were encouraged to smoke. Remember sweet cigarettes?”

Smoking was such a normal part of the social psyche years ago that sweet cigarettes aimed at children were sold alongside the real things – slim white candy tubes with a red end. I bought them on my way home from school because they contained cigarette cards.

They were first marketed in the 1930s and the online American company candyfavourites.com says: “Back then, smoking wasn’t seen as the health concern it is today so the public didn’t think it was a super big deal to allow children to pretend to smoke with these sugary imitations.”

Another US firm, the Old Time Candy Company, says: “There is evidence that the candy makers actually worked with the cigarette companies to attract young smokers. Today they are called candy sticks and the names are not the same as actual cigarette companies.”

It adds: ”The best thing we have seen is people sending them to family and friends to encourage them to stop smoking.”

Candy cigarettes have been banned in several countries – Brazil, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But not in the UK.

They may not be called sweet cigarettes, but they are still packaged the same way. Thirty or 40 years ago I don’t think they caused youngsters to switch from candy to tobacco.

Normal social pressures tempted children to the real thing because their parents and peers smoked.

Most of my schoolmates were secret smokers by the age of 13 because everyone else did.

Today sweet cigarettes are an obvious and inappropriate anachronism as smoking has been shown to be a merciless killer.

Times have changed and, thankfully, fewer people have the habit. In any case I never liked them. As confection they were rubbish. I much preferred liquorice pipes with the red beaded ends.

They still sell them, but I don’t see many teenagers making the switch from liquorice to a meerschaum pipe packed with Capstan ready rubbed. I think they might be safe.