Robin Ashenden

The pipes are calling: confessions of a pipe-smoker

Of all the vices I’ve explored, it's my favourite

  • From Spectator Life
Richard Dunhill lights up (Credit: Getty images)

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.

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Written by
Robin Ashenden
Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. He is currently writing a novel about Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev’s Thaw and the Hungarian Uprising.

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