could be inflected to raise my smoking as a very remote possibility, even a hypothetical of the type I don't smoke but would you mind if I did? These suggest that both forms are common enough in the language - something I'd say was true of BE too. Any who, I need some legal advice so that’s why I am sitting across from you in this uncomfortable office chair on a miserably hot August afternoon. Neither Jenny nor the numb nuts sign maker happened to notice that the apostrophe was missing between the Y and S. If there's an audio version of this, narrated by Fenella herself, of course, then I would much prefer that and it would get 5 stars from me.

Since the original sentence is meant to convey a request, we may notice that later is more humble than formal sentence. Were to" can be used in the future to emphasize that the conditional form is extremely unlikely or unthinkably horrible. Much of the meaning and colour of such questions depends on the tone of voice and the manner of the speaker. Could it be that since these two sentences have apparently similar meanings, they are not really conditionals but rather a courtesy or polite way of asking permission and therefore the present or past is acceptable?This sets up a hypothetical situation ("I smoked") and then makes a statement about that depends upon it being true ("You would mind") even though it is not true (this is the counter-factual conditional form; about things that are not true, and what would be consequent upon it if it was true). While this doesn’t exactly make for great literature, it oddly does add to her charm and gives a real sense of Fenella falling somewhat naïvely through a wondrous acting life that encompassed everything from a starring role Hedda Gabler to: Carry On Screaming, The Morecambe and Wise Show, and The Prisoner. She had a mouth like a trooper, and I miss her swearing, about life, situations, people and circumstances, something she did with so much grace and always appropriately. The same applies to smoked instead of smoke, which isn't really "past tense" there (it just means "not present tense, not here-and-now", because there are only two "tenses" in English). les gens qui fument et ceux qui ne fument pas) qui font partie intégrante ou, à l’inverse, sont exclues de la vie communautaire.

I may be slightly dishonest in what follows, in so far as I'm not totally convinced of the immaculate correctness of " would you mind if I smoke? Due to grammar rule, I only think of the sentence "would you mind if I smoked" but I still have seen some cases written down " Would you mind if smoke?The flames dazzled and hypnotized me, but I soon snapped out of it and realized that I needed to get the hell out of there before Barney Fife showed up again in his little police costume.