It's official - I'm an expert pipe smoker.

The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

--William Shakespeare

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Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

Umberto Eco

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When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.

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Barbour knives were special instruments in the world I grew up in the day before yesterday. Only special men, learned men, invariably pipesmokers, owned and used them. They were not for schoolboys nor for most ordinary men. Schoolboys possessed cheap gaudy-flanked penknives, usually supplied by Santa Claus. A remarkable number of these had the figure of a Canadian Mountie in his red jacket inscribed on them. All had bright silver blades. All of the blades were so blunt that you could not cut butter with them in midsummer. That's a fact.
The Barbour men in our parish would come into our country shop late in the evenings of my boyhood. They came to buy their Half-Quarters. Yes, that's not an error, they would ask you for a Half-Quarter. This was plug tobacco. It came in four ounce blocks, powerfully aromatic and compacted, and the Half-Quarter was the half of one - two ounces. We had a special little guillotine thing for cutting the block exactly in half. You needed that because every fraction of an ounce was special. The eyes watching the guillotine were as sharp as the blades of the Barbour - maybe even sharper!
You'd cut and they'd pay and they'd always fill their pipe before leaving the shop, hipped against the wooden counter, hand fishing into the frock coat pocket, (yes frock coat! - to us a jacket), and you'd watch like a hawk, with amazement, with awe even, at the ease with which either of the two Barbour blades pared off the whorls of redolent tobacco from a plug whose trade name was Walnut and whose surface was just as hard. No problem at all to the Sheffield blades. They just glided through it, the opening element of a ritual which afterwards saw the shavings of plug being ground into a soft fibrous mass between two horny palms, effortlessly, the opened knife pointing skywards the while, and then the bowl of the pipe being filled, the match applied. And, most often, the steel storm lid being put over the bowl before the smoking Barbour man set off for home on his High Nellie bicycle, tendrils of smoke trailing behind. I see them now, kings of the Raleigh bike saddles, tall spare men, belted gabardine coats and hats, proud and dignified on their own range as the Mounties on the plasticated flanks of our blunt penknives.
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