Kate Moss blew curls of smoke from her nostrils as she strutted the Marc Jacobs runway in Paris this week. It was UK National No Smoking Day, but smoking is just as illegal on a Paris catwalk as it is here. Bof! Kate Moss is the naughtiest girl in the school and I cannot find it in me to fault her, condemn her or do other than admire her.  She is, in that tiresome phrase, a role model to young women. Not one that any sane mother could welcome, obviously, but nevertheless. At a certain point in a young woman's life, perhaps when the realisation sets in that being a girl is not quite as much roller-coaster fun as being a boy, Kate Moss beats Kate Middleton in the wannabe stakes, because of her strutting self-confidence, her high courage and her utterly careless good looks.  Just as every man thinks meanly of himself for never being a soldier (so said Samuel Johnson), every woman nurses a bat squeak of wild desire to strut a stage in whip-crackaway boots and déshabillé singing I Am the Naughty Lola, while breathing fire and driving men mad. (Don't write in if you're not the whip-crackaway type, please. Just count yourselves lucky that you don't have such fantasies buried deep about your persons.)  I bought the papers with Moss's pictures in from Wyn the Shop on Wednesday. He was manning one of the tills. He kept breaking off to study the tobacco gantry on the wall behind him, packed tight with all the despised products which he may legally continue to sell but – thanks to Andrew Lansley – no longer legally display once the ban comes in. His five narrow shelves (costing £7,000 to fill – wow) are laid out in the same way as in every other small shop, with pricey Hamlets and cigarillos on the hard-to-reach top shelf (to deter thievery), Rizla papers at the bottom and the fastest-selling ciggie brands within speediest reach in the middle. Wyn's shop, a sprawl of two knocked-about 18th-century village houses, hasn't a spare inch of space.  Can't he just cover the gantry with a curtain? Or a blind? "Tried that approach, Blossom. They won't have it. Because the assistant has to open the curtain, see? And the child (he points up the aisle towards the organic milk fridge) could see through the slit." Getting very Welsh, he says: "Got to be hid-den from view. Child not allowed to even see a pack-et in case it sets him long-ing for tobacco. They have to go under the counter."  But it's a tiny counter. Wyn ducks his not inconsiderable body down behind it, at which point there's no room to man the other till, and his voice curls up as though he had gone into the cupboard under the stairs. All the seven grand's worth of tiny, slippery packets will have to cram under there, where you can't see them or sort them. The lowest shelf is at floor-level. Small village shops are important employers – women who are heavily pregnant, rheumatic, awaiting a knee op or working all hours heroically past their expected retirement age can staff them, and do. Wyn got off his knees and surfaced slowly. "Ten, 20 times an hour, we're going to be doing that." One of his not-so-young ladies behind the counter said, "Not me – not with my back, it won't stand it."  Does this Government, a Tory-led Government (imagine me shouting in a Welsh accent here, red hair thinning), actually believe that putting the cancer-sticks into plain grey boxes and shoving them under the counter will stop them being desirable? And prevent 15-year-old girls from wanting to set fire to the things and blow out smoke through a pouty mouth? Tories can't be that dumb.  Cigarettes are cool, sexy, naughty, anti-social, dangerous to health, filthy and loudly condemned by all right-thinking grown-ups. Now they're going to be in plain wrappers and slipped out from under the counter into a customer's hand. Try and make them even more attractive to young wannabes, why don't you?
Hiding tobacco under the counter is a come-on that no young wannabe can    resist, writes Vicki Woods.