I recently told my doctor I smoke twenty a day, then about ten in the evenings — and I try and keep it down to five during the night. I also told him that I have had three doctors in the last fifty years. Each of them recommended I give up. But each of them has now died; the last one only a year older than me. My new doctor laughed and said nothing. He has a good sense of humour.

My father was a very keen anti-smoker, but he died at 75 because he ate too many chocolate biscuits. He was a diabetic who would walk up the street to buy a packet of chocolate biscuits and then eat them all in the park. This caused him to go into comas, which he did once too often and died of a heart attack in the hospital. He knew that going into a coma damages your heart, but he was a lot more worried about the smokers.

I knew this was completely irrational, but I also knew that he wasn’t alone. One of the reasons I moved to Normandy was because there are many people in England like him who are now trying to ban smoking. All of them are humourless bossy boots.

They are now trying it in Oxfordshire, which wants to become England’s first “smoke-free” county. I have no plans to go there. I was once invited by the Oxford Union to a debate on smoking, but I had to decline because of my deafness — although I did also point out that there’s not a hotel in Oxford where you can smoke.

It is the relentlessness of these people that has demonised smoking in England and America. Why are they listened to? It wouldn’t happen in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

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The Guardian published a report last week about how there were now 1.1 billion smokers in the world — but it also mentioned that 8 million had “died” from smoking, and how terrible that was. I had to remind them that 8 million was 0.73% of 1.1 billion, so what about the 99.27 % that hadn’t?

It’s all madness to me and something should be said. I have always thought the world to be mad and it has been madder at other points in my lifetime. I was, after all, born in 1937. I would normally be willing to take on the anti-smokers, but at the moment I’m living a very quiet life in Normandy, working away because I’ve something to do. I have a purpose in life.

Not many people in England will defend smoking. They are intimidated by the medical profession and “social pressure”. Well, I’m lucky I can’t hear the “social pressure”, let alone what the doctors have to say. Their obsession with health is unhealthy. Longevity shouldn’t be an aim in life; that to me seems to be life-denying.

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I know the World Health Organisation is also part of this madness. They might relentlessly go on about it, but why are they listened to? They are completely irrational. They won’t give up, just like my father.

In my profession, Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. I don’t smoke much when I’m painting, but I light a cigarette every fifteen minutes when I stop to check what I have done. Monet smoked while he painted, but kept them in his mouth all the time. I can’t do that. I take a drag then hold it in my hand.

Renoir also smoked: if you go on YouTube and type in “Renoir smoking and painting”, you will see an old man painting with difficulty because of his arthritic hands. And then he lights a cigarette. I can tell he enjoys it enormously, and all these bossy boots would deny him that pleasure.

I know there will always be bossy people. Anne Applebaum says that 30% of people in every country have an “authoritarian disposition” — but doesn’t she just mean “bossy”? Smoking for me is a deep pleasure and 1.1 billion people in the world seem to agree. It can never be stopped; smokers would just start growing their own tobacco. But we need more people to defend it, otherwise the bossy boots will win in England.

I’m 100% sure that I am going to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking related illness. But I couldn’t imagine not smoking, and when people tell me to stop I always point this out. I’ve done it for 68 years, so are you telling me I’m doing something wrong? Fuck off.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.

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And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.

The monks of Abingdon were making books and writing history centuries before any scholars came to settle in Oxford. One of the most influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church, St Æthelwold, was abbot here in the tenth century. A vigorous and industrious man — and a champion of educational and religious progress — Æthelwold didn’t spend long at Abingdon. But it still bears traces of the work he did to build up the abbey: a stream in the town, once the abbey millstream, follows the course Æthelwold and his monks set for it a thousand years ago. They may have been copying the line of the prehistoric defences, already ancient by Æthelwold’s time.

Æthelwold and his fellow abbots were running a school at Abingdon when Oxford was just a crossing-place over the Thames. But by the twelfth century, when Abingdon’s most famous son was born, the balance was already beginning to shift. Abingdon’s own saint, Edmund, was born into a middle-class family in the town around 1174. His mother wanted him to be well-educated, so she sent him not to the abbey but to school in Oxford, which by that time was gathering the communities of teachers and students who would form the nucleus of the university.

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A devout and studious boy, Edmund made the most of his opportunities, and prospered both in Oxford and at university in Paris. He was known for his skill as a lecturer, his attention to his students, and his generosity to poorer scholars. He ended his career as Archbishop of Canterbury, but it’s as “Edmund of Abingdon” that he has gone down in history — and how he’s remembered here.

His mother Mabel is buried in one of Abingdon’s medieval churches, and around the town you can see representations of her symbol: three interlocking circles, which she drew on Edmund’s palm to remind him that with all his learning, honouring the Holy Trinity must still be his highest aim. By drawing those lines on her son’s hand, she left her mark on the town as surely as the people who traced out its medieval street plan.

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Behind the little church in which Edmund’s mother is buried stretches the site by the Thames where the abbey of Abingdon once stood. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey’s buildings were destroyed, leaving a huge expanse of empty ground. Some of that space is now a public park, with bright flowerbeds, a swimming pool, and a broad green space where children play over the footprint of the abbey church marked out in the grass. The building would have been the size of the greatest churches in England — imagine Wells Cathedral — and no less splendid. Nothing of it survives.

But in a town thousands of years old, a couple of hundred years seem like nothing. It’s worth remembering that the abbey acted as the town’s heart for more centuries than have passed since its destruction. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was an imposing presence in Abingdon — one of the greatest landowners in the county, as well as the chief provider of education and healthcare. Losing it must have ripped the heart out of the town, but the wound closed over, grass grew on the site, life went on. Though the big church was destroyed, the town’s smaller churches went on doing their work, and other monuments to medieval philanthropy endured: a complex of beautiful almshouses which have been looking after the town’s elderly since the fifteenth century, and a school which traces its origins back more than 750 years.

Today Abingdon is small enough to have maintained its identity, but big enough to have a thriving community willing to celebrate it. I first visited during a heritage festival, which revelled in an eclectic mish-mash of moments from the town’s long history: a display of medieval pilgrim badges, some Anglo-Saxon beads, a few men in khaki to remember Abingdon’s First World War dead. Of course, the town has seen plenty of tragedies in its thousands of years: plenty of loss, change and suffering. That’s what “continuous occupation” means — a long history of living and dying.

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As in any town, the history of Abingdon isn’t fossilised, but always developing, adding new layers. Part of Berkshire since the time of Alfred the Great, Abingdon was gobbled up by Oxfordshire in 1974, and most recently it’s become part of a region branded ‘Science Vale UK’, which intends to be “a global hotspot for enterprise and innovation”. But you can have innovation and still remember the past: a place of enterprise this has always been, as much now as when Æthelwold marked out his millstream. The stream keeps going; so does the town.

That’s what British history is in a place like this — accretive and accumulative. The history of an island where people have lived in the same places for thousands of years is less a series of discrete moments, however violent and disruptive each individual event might be, and more like a stream — countless days flowing into each other, carrying onwards the place and its people. At this strange time of social disruption, when everything is “unprecedented” and a “new normal”, there’s comfort in the thought of that continuous flow.