A BLAZE OF SMOKE AND THUNDER

The BBC, notorious for slanting data for maximum appeal to their audience, has decided that pipe-smoking is an altogether horrible thing that it would be better people forgot about. Good heavens, little kiddie-winkies might think it cool if they knew it existed!

And we should all be protective of children, shouldn't we? As well as vicious harpies and dried-up old flounders who object to any evidence of tobacco in the media. Because it is Sodom and Gomorrah all at once.

What, you may wonder, wax I wroth about?


Quote:
"...the BBC, in its wisdom, or in thrall to its own addiction – which is to political correctness – has chosen to play down Wilson’s pipe in its five-hour tribute to be shown on BBC Parliament."
[End cite.]

That passage is from an article in The Telegraph by Allan Massie, anent a television programme about former prime-minister Harold Wilson.

Methinks the BBC would do far better to run twenty-four hours of praise-song for dentistry, if they were really concerned about the health and oral-hygiene of the British public.

Further quote:
"Pipe-smoking has always been associated with common sense, even wisdom, which is why Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows smoked a pipe. It is a comforting habit, aiding contemplation."
[End cite.]


A comforting habit, aiding contemplation! What I'm contemplating right now is the end of civilization and it's sneaky replacement with Puritanical right-think. What would, at this moment, be of very great comfort, is if all those kiddie-winkies, harpies, and old flounders went off and buggered themselves.

Quote:
"Simenon’s Maigret puffed his way through every investigation. The actor Rupert Davies was the first person to get the pipe-smoking award, presumably because he played Maigret, and smoked his pipe so well on television. Rather surprisingly perhaps, Dorothy L Sayers’s detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, was also a pipe smoker. I have the notion that Miss Sayers smoked one herself, even if not as devotedly as Simenon. Authors sometimes lend their own habits to their favourite characters.

This may be why Philip Marlowe, greatest of tough-guy private eyes, was a pipe-lover; his creator, Raymond Chandler, was rarely photographed without a briar in mouth or hand. Even so, he wasn’t quite as dedicated as that other distinguished old boy of Dulwich College, P G Wodehouse, still photographed, pipe in mouth and tapping away at his typewriter well into his eighties. The young Evelyn Waugh smoked a pipe, but turned to cigars when he became more prosperous. J B Priestley, however, puffed away well into old age, Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1979.

You seldom see people smoking a pipe in public now, in this country anyway, though it is still a common sight at café tables in Paris. (Back in the Forties and Fifties anyone who wanted to be regarded as a French intellectual copied the example of the prophet of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and took to a pipe.) "
[End cite.]

The list of celebrated pipe-smokers is endless; that of beloved puritan hatchets, virtually non-existent.

I'm smoking a pipe right now, btw.

TOBACCO INDEX


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