A matter of taste

As a beginning, to say that I am anti smoking would be somewhat hypocritical. In my life I have smoked on and off for the best part of 32 years, which is over half a lifetime.

It is ten years since that great and final giving up, with the exception of the odd pipe and cigarette smoked on stage I have stopped. I welcome the ban and Im glad to not have smoke smelling clothes should I enter a public house or have that throat tightening gasp as air filled with active and passive smoke enters the lungs.

Smoking for me was an experience. I had frequent periods of brand alliance but in my smoking career, I have used pipes, both clay and wooden and a range of cigars. I have inhaled snuff. Squeezing a button with thumb and forefinger to make a much greater pinch ability, the fine brown and aromatic powder, was placed on the back of the hand and snorted up a nostril. This was usually followed by bouts of sneezing and floods of tears to the eyes. The powder too ended up down you shirt. Smoking tobacco was quite the easier way to get the nicotine fix.

Smoking was always an experimental activity. The first furtive Woodbines, borrowed from a friend, were smoked because that’s what your parents did. Admittedly not down a back alley away from prying eyes, but simply because it was what grown ups did. And that was all manner of grown ups and of course the cowboy heroes in films.

How long can impressionable young people fail to succumb?

It didn’t catch on for me rally until as a student when Player’s number 6 were consumed in the five week panic revision in May and June and then it stopped. Well, it didn’t after the third year. I left university with a degree and a social habit and then began a romance with the weed.

I flirted with brands, charmed by their names and appearance. The packaging seduced me and I took delight to flaunt the colours and names in public. There was such a huge range of cigarettes just waiting to be sampled. It was not a love affair just a very big infatuation. Filtered or plain, it did not matter.

There was the clean and fresh packet of Churchman’s number 1, contrasting with the almost all white Olivier. I was charmed by the flip top bright red du Maurier box and the romance of Piccadilly with its city chic feel. The transatlantic soft pack of Peter Stuyvesant, a pack you tapped to cause the cigarettes to emerge. There were others too, but occasionally I used the popular brands that were sponsors of big events – Embassy and John Player Specials, as black a packet as Olivier was white. And naturally the gold pack of Benson and Hedges.

I found cigarettes that were not the familiar white cylinder. The black and gold of Sobranie, the pinks and the elliptical Passing Cloud and the heavy scented Gauloise all went through my hands.

It was a thrill to enter the tobacconist and choose something by the name and packaging that looked exotic and intriguing. It was always a disappointment to accept a common brand. They lacked the challenge and difference. Except for Park Drive. Park Drive seemed to enjoy great popularity around Sheffield where I can to work in the 1970s. They were small and distinctive in flavour but they offered a good variety to the taste of smoke.

The affair of the cigarette ended in my early thirties. There was a brief pipe smoking distraction where tobaccos, both tinned and pouched, were bought on the merits of their name and labelling and later on the same with cigars which went from the tiny Tom Thumbs, smaller than a cigarette, to the King Edward Imperials and true Havana smokes from Upmann and Romeo and Juliet.

But what it comes down to is variety. I like to think that in my own way I am not prepared to make do with the ordinary and everyday brand leader. I am not satisfied with Fosters lager or John Smith’s bitter, smooth or cask. If smoking showed me anything, it was there was a whole range of product out there which extended beyond tobacco. I am not a great connoisseur and I do not just know what I like but I have tried to push the boat out a little way from the shore. It works in the beer and whisky I drink and to a lesser degree with wine. With food as well for eating too has had its experimentation, but the prices begin to increase when restaurants are involved.

It is a shame that blandness and lack of taste adventure seem to suit so many people. Let them be happy with their mass product. Curiosity has helped me in my own perhaps limited way become adventurous in the things I taste.