Write to James Leavey

Although I started smoking cigarettes at the age of twelve and had tried the occasional cheroot, the first time I encountered anyone smoking a proper cigar was when I worked for a South African newspaper and magazine company based in Fleet Street, in London, not long after I left school at 15.

One of my colleagues, a 15 year-old office messenger from Islington in north London, suggested I accompany his friend to see an X certificate film called 'Mono Cane' at a cinema in the Holloway Road. Having spent a night on the tiles the previous evening, we couldn't afford the price of three admission tickets, so we decided to sneak in. My friend, five feet 4 inches tall and dressed in a flashy mohair suit that convinced the cinema's cashier that he was indeed old enough to see the film, bought a ticket, went in, and sat down. A few minutes later he went to the toilet, and opened up the back door to the cinema so that his two pals could get in for free.

We then sat down, carefully, in the only three seats left in this crowded cinema - in the front row of the front stalls. The other young man, also from Islington and also dressed in a trendy mohair suit, then pulled out a double corona, bit the end off it, inserted a match to 'keep the hole open', ignited the cigar and sat back to watch the film.

Mondo Cane, made in Italy in 1961, was a notoriously gruesome documentary of thirty sequences of violently eccentric human behaviour, including cannibalism, a dog meal restaurant, insects as food, and women's skin peeled as part of a beauty treatment, and is now best remembered for its theme song, 'More', which became a worldwide hit. The film itself has rarely been shown since.

Mondo Cane also featured, about halfway through, the beheading of an ox by a man with a large sword, at which point, the young cigar smoker seated on my right, who had avidly watched every horrible detail, threw up all over the front stalls. Later, he blamed it on the cigar. Or maybe it was the match.

Unfortunately, this over-reaction to an exceptionally nasty bit of movie-making attracted the attention of the cinema manager - who asked us to produce our tickets and, when we were unable to do so, quite rightly threw the three of us out.

And I never actually got to try that cigar - which ended up on the floor in the goo.

Nowadays, such violent imagery is commonplace in cinemas, where cigars are now banned. Long gone are the days when you would try to see what was on the big screen through the clouds of exhaled smoke.

Not that I dislike going to the movies. Or that I ever gave up on cigars.

But nowadays I prefer to watch films from the comfort of my armchair at home.

And I avoid most gruesome documentaries, especially any that go on about the death-knell of smokers.