Pipes
Whatever happened to pipes? My previous post shows Ruskin Spear with one and a few weeks ago, Clement Attlee. The 20th Century rooms at the National Portrait Gallery display dozens of their subjects clutching the briar: both sitter and artist clearly thought it an essential ingredient of a fellow’s persona. Recalling my school days, I reckon at least 10 out of the 30 or so teaching staff partook. A pipe gives one maturity and gravitas, you see – the sign of a deep thinker. Bill Bailey always brandishes an imaginary pipe when conveying this. That’s why so many young men took up the pipe in their 6th form year or if not then, certainly as a year 1 undergraduate. I know I did. And yet today, you see virtually nobody smoking a pipe and if you do, the chap will invariably be quite ancient – a throwback, indeed, to a lost age. You may well say this is a jolly good thing: I think it’s a pity.
I have to plead guilty to the charge of undergraduate taker-up of the pipe though I don’t think many of my fellow students followed suit. I was also partial to a good cigar, not something often indulged in on a student grant!
There is a mystique about a pipe that does not extend to any other form of tobacco use. I spent hours cleaning and scraping out my various pipes, and money on different shapes and various patent designs, all to end up with a simple cherry wood pipe which I henceforth favoured.
The pipe has suffered, I think, from the cancer scare and from the ban on smoking in public places. It’s easy enough to step outside the pub for 10 minutes and light up a cigarette but loading a pipe and getting it going takes time, as does the smoking of it. You simply can’t have a “pipe break” as you can have a “cigarette break”.
Maybe too, the fashion for pipe smoking has passed. The pipe no longer enjoys the special aura it once did and in a world where hurry, rather than repose, is the keynote, few are patient enough to go through the rigmarole when they can get their nicotine hit quicker and with less fuss. However, I do note that there is one form of pipe smoking that is enjoying increasing popularity: the shisha, aka the hookah. There are shisha bars everywhere you look and they are patronized by young people, women and well as men.
In case you are wondering, I no longer smoke a pipe – or anything else, for that matter. Quite a few years ago I one day ran out of tobacco and couldn’t be bothered to buy any more. At least it brought an end to sarky comments from my hygienist…!
Misspent youth, eh. I didn’t last very long with the pipe thing, didn’t take to it at all. You are right about ciggie v pipe if you are in the pub. But I think the pipe was already an endangered species by then in any case. Not sure when they stopped doing Pipe Smoker of the Year, some time before, I suspect. But I think you hit the nail on the head in saying that there is no place for the pipe in fast-moving late 20C life.