One of the good things about not smoking any more is that yesterday I did not get told off by a seven year old.

My daughter and the rest of her Year Two classmates were out on the streets of Caldas da Rainha to mark national no-smoking day by waving placards and handing out leaflets to any unfortunates they saw smoking. It seems social action gets younger every year.

Fortunately things have moved on since I was a kid and their efforts were met with good humour and appreciation. I was brought up in a time when cigarettes were associated with a world of beautiful women, speedboats, fast cars and lives of rugged glamour in the great outdoors. It was a time when children did not dare suggest lifestyle changes to the adults around them.

One of the leaflets handed out by children yesterday

I made just one misguided attempt after an over-enthusiastic teacher told us that if we really loved our parents we would get them to kick the habit. Looking back I possibly picked a bad time to communicate this zeal to my father.

I can see now that he was having one of those moments at the end of a long and stressful working day when the pool of pleasures available to us as adults appears to be shrinking daily. At times like those smoking becomes a treasured treat that we guard and hang on to with all the ferocity of a rabid dog.

So nagging my Dad about it while caught in a bottleneck of Friday night traffic was perhaps a bad idea. I remember his Texan plain glowing red hot as he waved it about in the air, the steering wheel being thumped for emphasis, a voice so angry it felt like the windows would explode and my mother’s efforts to calm him down. The rest of the journey continued in icy silence and I never raised the subject again.

It could have been worse. My brother-in-law tells the story of how he once asked his mother to stop smoking in the car. She pulled over to the side of the road, kicked him out and drove off. It was night-time, they were four miles from home and he was just seven years old. He stood there alone in the dark until his father realised what had happened and went to fetch him. As far as I know my brother-in-law has never touched a cigarette.

I on the other hand smoked happily for 30 years and would still be smoking were it not for the savage coughing in the morning and the certain knowledge that it will kill me well before my time. Some people are born to be clean-cut and good-living with their honed bodies and polished faces, and some are born to smoke and drink and party through the night. I fall enthusiastically into the latter category.

The thing is I like smoking and I like smokers. I’ve never subscribed to the view that smoking is a disgusting habit. It doesn’t even make sense to me. When I set fire to a pile of leaves in my garden no one comes over to tell me I am committing a disgusting act. Ashtrays are just ash and tar, a bit like my fireplace and I’m very fond of that.

I’ve had some great times while smoking, and at parties would always head for wherever the smokers were hanging out simply because that was where the most fun was to be had. But now it seems as if hardly anyone smokes. None of our friends smoke and our living rooms are always fresh and bright the morning after.

Smokers are now pushed to the borders of society where they lurk on park benches and on street corners and hide from kids waving placards. I know that the end of smoking will make for a better society, longer lives and a healthier environment for our children. But I can’t help feel a little nostalgia for the old days of smoky pubs, shared cigarettes on winter beaches and a lit cigarette keeping me company through the night as I hammered away on a keyboard. The truth is I’m a natural born smoker. I just don’t smoke anymore.

I think there must be a workshop nearby where a group of dour and taciturn men are labouring in silence with ragged paintbrushes and bits of old board. There is no music in the air and no joy in their hearts. They work beneath a single naked light bulb and the room is still apart from the scratching of stiff bristles on wood.

Their job is to produce the signs that around here are hung on bits of wire from traffic signs and lamp posts to advertise local events. Their mission, however, is to give as little information away as possible.

I imagine they are men of few words, men who regard ‘good morning’ as an unnecessary display of emotion. They operate on a strictly need-to-know basis. Their signs are minimal and cryptic to a point where I wonder if there is some prize for the sign that attracts the least amount of people to an event.

The one I saw this morning offered this irresistible proposition: ‘Os Lord’s, Serra do Bouro, 13 Nov’. This is not hard sell as I know it. No mention of the venue, no catchy slogan, no start time and I can’t even say for sure if the sign went up before November 13. I didn’t see it last week but that is not to say it wasn’t there. It’s not exactly the most eye-catching bit of advertising I have seen.

I know I am being way too English in looking for any more information than the sign provides. I am sure local people know that Os Lord’s is a band and so expect a night of big amplifiers, smoke machines and some jigging about on the dance floor. Finding the venue is probably not much of a problem either – according to the last census there were just 720 people living in Serra do Bouro so it would not take much detective work to figure out where they have all gone.

As for the start time, well this is Portugal and time here is a very fluid concept. Nothing happens on time anyway and pretending otherwise would be seen as a conceit by the men of the silent room.

Of course there is the possibility that the lack of information is deliberate, that the signs are there to communicate something to people already in the know without letting strangers and other undesirables know too much about the party. I’m tempted to check this out just to see if I get looks of shock and surprise at the door. After all, I now know where Serra do Bouro is.

When the boat appeared out of the fading light on the lagoon we thought it was the GNR coming to break up the party. The GNR police are not particularly well known for their sense of fun and as beach fires are illegal we figured they would take a dim view of the campfire of burning driftwood we had built on the beach.

As it happened the boat wasn’t full of sour-faced policemen armed with fire extinguishers and wet blankets, just a solitary guy motoring back with the vastness of the lagoon behind him. He pulled his boat up in the next cove along and there was something empty and desolate about the sight of him wading alone through the dark water to shore.

The problem was his boat. It was not one of the traditional wooden fishing boats that work the waters of Óbidos lagoon. I expect these to be crewed by solitary men because that’s the way it’s always been and I’m not about to start questioning tradition or even wondering what is so bad about home that makes the damp waters of the lagoon appear to be better company.

To my mind this guy’s boat was not designed for solitary occupation. It was a semi-rigid inflatable thing with a sexy upward rake to its bow, upholstered seats and one of those cool cockpits that look a bit like the conning tower of a submarine. I bet it even had a built-in ice box, although I also bet this guy had done the unthinkable and filled it with fish.

It was the kind of boat that brings parties to mind, the kind you see carving across the water while beautiful people on board hold onto their hats and sip from glasses of chilled wine. It was not a boat that you picture being pulled from the cold water by a man working alone in the gathering night.

I should admit here that my approach to boating is not exactly hardcore. I love being on boats but I don’t really care if they even leave the quayside as long as the fridge is well stocked. I have been on a fair number of these things and have never yet left one sober, so I naturally equate owning a boat with being at the centre of a whole lot of fun. This guy had either shunned the social circle or failed to find one. Either way it looked sad to me.

But then I was sitting with good friends around a fire watching the day go down on the shores of Óbidos lagoon. We had ignored the weather and made our stand on a sandy beach where we barbecued, ate and drank while the children hunted after sea cucumbers and threw bamboo spears at imaginary sea monsters. The rain held off and even the sun made an appearance once or twice.

So I sat around the fire watching him wrestle the boat onto a trailer and thinking about how I’d lusted after one of those things ever since I saw Crockett and Tubbs tearing up the waters of Miami. And I figured that if I was ever asked to choose between sitting in great company around a fire on the beach or owning the boat of my dreams – even with the champagne and complementary beautiful people thrown in – I’d choose the fire every time.

Sometimes there is nowhere else you would rather be. Those times often involve a fire on the beach. I think I’m going to have to discuss this with the GNR.

The weather forecast on the screen in front of me is showing that rain and high winds are ‘probable’ tomorrow afternoon. It says we can expect at least one hour of rain and winds of up to 30 kilometres per hour.

Tomorrow afternoon a group of us are having a picnic on the shore of Óbidos lagoon. This is not because we’ve missed the forecast. It is because we have all spent enough time in England to know that weather forecasts do not apply to us.

We will take precautions like raincoats and a very large tarpaulin but secretly in all our hearts we will be expecting it to be one of those miraculous afternoons when the sun breaks through and shines down on the exact spot we have chosen to make our stand and defy the weather.

I am as romantic about picnics as anyone who has ever coveted one of those ludicrously impractical wicker hampers with leather straps holding piles of dinky plates and cups. I particularly like the ones that come with bespoke salt and pepper sets but maybe that is something I should be discussing with my counsellor.

Anyway the point I am making is that I’m not knocking this idea in any way. I love picnic madness. I’m packing for war – charcoal, barbecues, rope, groundsheet, stout stakes, shrink-wrapped matches, fire lighters and a serious man-sized club hammer (some might call it a mallet but that is a word for effete hobbyists and not one I allow into my anti-weather armoury).

But I can’t help indulging in a reality check and imagine how we might explain this to aliens or even our own European neighbours. We all have perfectly good homes to go to with fully equipped kitchens, DVDs for the kids, music for the atmos, fridges for the beer and wine, heating, and comfortable seating on which there is absolutely no chance of getting sand caught in awkward places.

Yet tomorrow we will wrap up warm, lock the doors on all that comfort and head out into the wind and rain to stand with wet bread in our hands and rain dripping down our backs. And even in that moment of supreme sogginess we will still be watching and waiting for the sun to break through. Bring it on. It’s the kind of craziness that makes it great to be alive.

I like a party that comes with instructions and the more straightforward they are the better. Christmas is a good one – ‘eat, drink and be merry’. No ambiguity there – and no mention of limits.

So I was struck by one of the traditional instructions I came across for the feast of St Martin which is celebrated today: ‘By St Martin kill your pig and drink thy wine’. It may have lost something in translation but there is something stirringly Neanderthal about this, something right up there with ‘catch woman, drag to cave, throw onto bear skin’.

The bloodier aspects of the celebration are more of a rural thing these days and most people stick to the fun bit – roasting chestnuts and drinking wine. Tradition says it should be the new wine or Água-pé (an alcoholic drink made from grape pulp which is outlawed but still available if you know who to ask). In reality anything goes. Chestnuts are like cheese and I couldn’t think of eating them without a glass of red wine or port within arm’s reach.

I don’t know how the chestnuts and wine muscled in on the celebrations but I’m not complaining. They certainly don’t appear to have anything to do with St Martin. Before finding religion he was a Roman soldier who is famed for cutting his cloak in two and giving half to a beggar during a ferocious storm. A few years later after finding Christianity he became one of the world’s early conscientious objectors when he refused to fight in a battle against the Gauls and instead volunteered to go to the front line unarmed.

In that sense he probably has far more to do with this also being Remembrance Day, the day the UK and other former Allies honour the sacrifice of soldiers killed and maimed in World War I and all the wars since. November 11 is the day St Martin was buried. It is also the day that this ‘war to end all wars’ ended. I read today there have been over 40 major wars and just 26 days of worldwide peace since then. I reckon St Martin would be seriously unimpressed by the world’s ability to remember.