READING Emma Brennan “Harking Back” in The Press recently she recounted the fish and chip shop owner who had a permanent cigarette hanging from his mouth with an inch long ash hanging on at the end which fell into the chips no doubt. At one practice in West Yorkshire, basically in the front room of the house, the vet and his nurse had a dog on his operating table. The vet had a cigarette in his mouth, one of those glued to the corner, with a long wedge of ash hanging off the end which, as he talked to me dropped off into the open surgical wound of the dog. I must have been brave, and I challenged him about the ash dropping. “No problem,” he said, adding it was “sterile” having been red hot at the end of his cigarette.