Picture the stereotypical striptease pub – somewhere slightly old and grimy-looking in the East End of London, with an innocuous name such as The Nags Head or Ye Olde Axe. The windows are blacked out so innocent passers-by don’t see what’s going on inside, a heavy bass beat can faintly be heard, and as you walk past you sense an air of seediness mixed with excitement and a slight edge of danger. You get up the nerve one lunch hour to go inside, and push open the door to be greeted with a totally masculine scene (a rare thing these days) – a group of workmen in their road clothes and a few solo businessmen in suits, pints in front of them, staring at the stage at the far end, where a semi-naked girl gyrates to music far louder than the volume outside had suggested. Two more girls in skimpy sequined dresses and full sparkly make-up - a slightly bizarre sight at one in the afternoon – sit at the bar chatting and the unusually pretty barmaid cleans glasses. All this is seen through a soft-focus sepia haze of cigarette smoke, the smell of nicotine mixing with that of beer, sweat and heady women’s perfume.

That stereotype is pretty correct in many respects. But there is one major difference in the past two months of course – there isn’t any smoke. The smoking ban has removed that particular atmospheric enhancement, and we strippers, along with the pub landlords – whether we’re smokers or non - have been dreading its demise since the start of the year.

We assumed the pubs would lose much of their trade. We assumed guys would dodge the pound-coin collection, which is the way we make our earnings, with the excuse of going out for a fag, only to nip back in once they hear our stage music start. Chain-smoking dancers imagined they’d have to go an entire shift without a cigarette, or stand outside with their coats over their skimpy outfits. Also, particularly in the table-dancing clubs, the easy ice-breaker of walking up to a table of smoking guys and asking for a fag or a light would be gone.

Even smokers mostly don’t seem to have been put off – it seems pussy is more addictive than nicotine. And those who do need to nip out for a puff are respectfully giving us our pound coins beforehand.

For us girls, it’s nice for freshly-washed costumes not to smell like a week-old ashtray after just one shift, and the venues have provided various ways to make the smokers’ live easier – including at The Peel (on Cambridge Road in Kingston) long baby-pink dressing gowns for the girls to slip on over their costumes should they wish to step outside for a fag.

So the smoke has gone from the erotic scene I describe at the start. For many people there will always remain something undeniably sexy about smoking though. Since the earliest Hollywood films cigarettes have been used for erotic symbolism, and even now we know what nasty things they actually do to the body this image still sticks. In porn, cigarettes and cigars sometimes appear, to suggest danger or wealth respectively. For a select few, this has developed one step further into capnolagnia, the fetishisation of smoking.

Now that smoking it set to become more and more rare, maybe it will become a more common fetish, things which are rare being particularly desirable. It’s already becoming an even stronger bonding act between fellow smokers than it was before, although many of my dancer friends are using the ban as a kick-start to giving up. So if you’re a smoker and you fancy an easy way of chatting up a stripper, and a pink dressing gown won’t put you off, grab your chance now.