Britain

This essay by Andrew Martin in Granta has some wonderful insights into the appeal of pipe smoking:

My Uncle Sid smoked a pipe. He maximized the soothing, ritualistic aspects of the process in that he not only wielded the pipe cleaners, the various prodding instruments of a pipe tool and the weathered, old-faithful tobacco pouch, but he also rubbed his own tobacco, which came out of the tin solid, like a little piece of card. When these preliminaries were complete, and the flame was lowered on to the tobacco, there was what seemed like a crisis (not that Uncle Sid was remotely unsettled) as he discharged great clouds of smoke in the opening moments of combustion. This, to me, was as time-hallowed, as wholly masculine and right, as seeing a steam locomotive getting going. And in fact Uncle Sid was a train driver, and it was the contrast between his man of action persona – he was also a keen gardener – and the state he fell into with the pipe properly lit that I found particularly attractive. When Uncle Sid’s pipe was up and running, so to speak, then the smoke streams issuing from him were almost invisible, and he seemed to exist in a different dimension. He might be referred to by those present (especially, and in rather aggrieved tones, by his own wife), but he hardly ever participated in the conversation himself. Well, he didn’t need to: he had his pipe.

On those occasions when my father took me into pubs, I would focus on the Uncle Sid types, with their pipes in their mouths and their pipe paraphernalia on the table before them, forming a barricade between them and the outside world. The pipe was so obviously the priority with these men that I would wonder how those in their company could put up with being marginalized in that way. But I was on the side of the pipemen. Objectively, you might say they were under-weaned, but to me their pipes symbolized maturity and achievement. Pipes were not dashing or rakish, as cigars were in the nineteenth century and cigarettes in the twentieth; they were for men who’d graduated beyond trying to be ‘cool’, and I admired that, perhaps because I stood on the foothills of trying to be cool myself, and I knew it was going to be a hard slog.

Read the whole thing for a lovely description of the remaining embers of pipe culture in Great Britain.

Previously:
Pipe up!