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It is highly demotivating when I turn up for work one morning with my trusty guide dog, support the local economy by buying a coffee on the way in, say hi to the security guards and reception staff, smile at my colleagues then read the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News site to discover that the general consensus is that it's better to be dead than be like me.

Here's the offending story: . The main thrust of the story is that 'Experts' are calling for cigarette packets to carry a warning that smoking can cause blindness.

Cigarette packages have carried very large warnings on the front for a number of years now with messages such as 'smoking kills' and 'smoking can harm your baby'. But it seems now that despite having a third of the packet taken up with a death notice, that's not good enough and might not be working. So 'experts' have gone, what, one step beyond death? I'm trying to imagine the meeting they must have had:

"People are still smoking, chaps. Death just isn't shocking enough these days. There's only one thing for it, lets bring out the big guns and tell the buggers they'll go blind if they continue."

Shall we just quickly deal with the fact that there is another pleasureable act said to make you go blind if you do it too much ... well, centuries of those warnings didn't work too well did they? Why do they think it'll do any better with the dreaded addictive disgusting and deeply unattractive pouuty smokey tar filled cancer-causing weed that people seem to love to near-orgasmic levels so damn much?

Frankly it only took Superman versus the evil Nick O'Teen ads in early 80s kids magazines to put me off for life - a little unfair, then, that I went blind at thirteen before I'd even thought about taking a single puff.

Ironically, though, it was when I was in hospital going blind that they discovered I had a heart problem and did something about it. Let me spoonfeed you a bit here ... had I not gone blind I would be dead. So in that respect I'm glad I'm blind ... or I'd be, um, dead.

Digest this new blind/death conundrum a second while I remind you that blind people can't read death warnings on cigarette packets because they're blind and thus get no help from the government in this respect anyway. Though you don't see dead people currently walking around with cigarettes in hand (proof they kill you?) you may soon be seeing blind people walking around with cigarettes in hand (proof they blind you? Don't blind you? Don't kill you?)

So, if blindness warnings do start appearing on cigarette packets will this put blind people off because it's just getting a bit too complex a thing to deal with? Blind people can't see the blindness warnings on a packet of blindness causing cigarettes because they're blind? Does that make them exempt from blindness? Or death? Will they be everyone's worse walking talking prognosis if seen fagging it in a pub? A little tragic or quite cool? Maybe it just won't matter if you can't see the blindness warnings due to blindness. Go blind and you won't get cancer? Get cancer and you won't go blind? What a thing to have to mull over at the tobacconist counter. Thank heaven's I used to read Look-In.

Scratch the surface though and you find that they're not really saying blindness is worse than death. What a relief. The reason why The Royal College of Ophthalmologists, RNIB and others are saying this (besides getting publicity from this media friendly story) is because it brings the potential consequences of smoking into the now.

Studies have shown it's possible to get Macular Degeneration (MD) earlier than cancer and sight is extremely highly valued as a sense. Cancer is worth the long term gamble, but losing your sight in the short term may make people think twice.

So, when I leave work tonight, go down the pub and passively breathe in other people's blind-stick fumes, and someone comes up to me and says "is it better to be blind than dead" ... will I care? Naw, to be honest it'll just be a welcome change from "is it better to be blind or deaf". Oh and roll on the smoking ban.