Robin Ashenden
The pipes are calling: confessions of a pipe-smoker Of all the vices I’ve explored, it's my favourite.
This morning, like so many other mornings, I spent at least half an hour, over coffee, staring at online pictures of pipes. This does not make me an aspiring plumber, or someone with a fetish for u-bends or draining units. I’m talking about briar pipes, tobacco pipes: for though I know I should quit the habit, I’m one of the dwindling band of pipe-smokers in the world.
This isn’t an aesthetic choice, nor an activity I undertake outside the house. No one is more attractive with a 150mm briar-wood appendage sticking out of their mouths – apart possibly from Sherlock Holmes, Tony Benn or Gunther Grass, and I don’t want to look like I think I’m any of them. But it remains true that pipe-smoking, of all the vices and addictions I’ve explored, is my favourite. Though I’ve tried to kick it several times, it’s the bad habit that keeps dragging me back. We’ve now reunited more times than Burton and Taylor: this can only be love.
It was a Russian friend who got me into it. Pipe-smoking, he told me, was his form of meditation, the thing that regularly sent him into a kind of trance. He’d got into it in the 1990s, when after communism fell and free trade flourished, a local pipe-master (or maker) started selling them on a rug laid out on the street. ‘A cigarette is a one-night stand,’ my friend told me. ‘Over quickly, mostly unmemorable, easily discarded. But a pipe is your friend for life.’
Trying the different blends was a bit like wine-tasting: there were bad tobaccos (think ‘plonk’) and fine tobaccos, and no two blends were the same
Giving it a try, I entered one of the most compelling, habit-forming sub-cultures I’d ever found. There are plenty of rabbit-holes to go down in life, though few that hold you there so avidly. Part of it is the tobaccos, as different from the cigarette-kind as you can imagine. There are buttery Latakias from Syria, peppery Periques from Louisiana, bready or grassy Virginias from – no, not necessarily from Virginia, from almost anywhere it can grow. Trying the different blends was a bit like wine-tasting: there were bad tobaccos (think ‘plonk’) and fine tobaccos, and no two blends were the same.
There are tobacco factories, such as Samuel Gawith in the Lake District, whose roots in the noxious weed go back as far as 1792 (they still use 19th century equipment in their production), or Dublin’s Peterson company, selling pipes and tobacco since 1865. There is beautiful tin art, talk of tin notes (how the weed smells in the tin) and room notes (how it smells to onlookers), and marvellous paraphernalia – tamping tools, pipe-lighters, pipe-racks and pipe-reamers (for cleaning out the bowl). Were it not unhealthy and disapproved of – in an anti-smoking world – you’d wonder why more people weren’t doing it.
Actually, quite a lot are: you can find them on YouTube. Some look like they’ve given up and are just collapsing into a tobacco-saturated despond in a garden-shed, but there are one or two stars as well. There’s ‘Your good friend Bradley’ from the Stuff and Things channel, a laid-back Pacific north-west construction-worker and musician with a background in literature. His posts are hugely enjoyable, even philosophical at times – he seems to know the XYZ of tobacco production (or notebooks, or ink-pens, or handguns). There’s Muttnchop Piper, looking like a 19th century barber, broadcasting out of a kind of Geppetto’s workshop of pipes and blends in a soft Southern accent, or George Bruno from Listen My Son, an Italian-American book-lover going (it seems) though a perpetual mid-life crisis of image-changing but with the pipe-habit constant throughout.
Here it all grows embarrassing to talk about. It’s very easy to become a pipe geek viewing these posts. You can waste half an hour watching someone opening a delivery from a tobacco shop, talking about ‘cellaring’ the tobaccos he (and it nearly always is a ‘he’) won’t be able to smoke that year, or walking you through his pipe collection. This isn’t as dull as it sounds – pipes and their designs are compulsive, and their occasional beauty (the line of a classic billiard pipe, the sheen of the mouthpiece, the grain of the wood) is only upped by the fact they’re made to be constantly used. There are people who prefer bent mouthpieces (a Holmesian look) or straight ones (less embarrassing). There are smooth and sandblasted finishes, or ‘rustic’ style pipes that look hewn out of rock. Famous manufacturers – Italy’s Savinelli or Castello, or London’s Dunhill – produce pipes for which hot battles are fought on eBay. It’s possible, though I never have, to spend several hundred pounds on one of these.
There are long online debates too on the merits of flaked or ready-rubbed tobaccos, and it seems amazing to me I once didn’t know the difference. I still can’t decide which I prefer. Flakes look like miniaturised and flecked bars of chocolate: they’re produced by piling up different kinds of tobacco leaves, then compressing them hard and letting them mature over a period of months. When they’ve dried out and aged to a chocolate brown, they’re sliced into little wafers, and stacked up in tins: you must dry them out before crumbling them into your pipe. Ready rubbed takes care of this for you: you simply load up your pipe and smoke it, though even here there’s a world of variety: golden glowing tobaccos, speckled tobaccos, ribbon-cuts and shag-cuts, whose merits internet-forums of pipe-smokers worldwide rabbit on about incessantly. You don’t smoke a pipe as you smoke cigarettes – it’s all about the taste of the tobacco, the tingle of it in your nostrils. Though you don’t inhale, you might inhale an exhalation. Those who do this a lot buy filter pipes, with a disposable chunk of balsa wood or charcoal cylinder to wrench out some of the impurities. Another bit of paraphernalia to debate online.
What do I get out of it? A lot of pleasant time-wasting, excuse for navel-gazing, and the garlanding of straight nicotine-addiction. Of course, it’s all analogue with a vengeance, though this is half the fun. As the government plans for a smoke-free Britain by 2030, and speaks of the need to promote vaping, part of the appeal is doing something both timeless and untimely. It’s connecting yourself with a habit that goes back centuries, relatively unchanged, and passing (quite literally) the flame.
Naturally, it’s hell for the personal hygiene, as for the purse and health. A pipe-smoking habit is also a chewing gum habit, a teeth-brushing habit, a Listerine habit. But leave us alone please (we probably are already): we’re all still recovering from the great Dunhill debacle of 2018, when this fabled pipe-tobacco manufacturer, after more than a century of shelling out their legendary blends, decided to cease production. And an army of solitary men exiled to their garden-sheds or garages, clutching their Savinellis and Petersons, wreathed in clouds of Latakia smoke, shed a manly, nicotine-laden tear.
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