THAT'S VERY GANDALF OF YOU

The worst are the Lord Of The Rings types. They always want a long churchwarden pipe to complete their 'image', and then they'll stuff an aromaticized tobacco that no one with a shred of taste or decency would smoke into it. Many of them also have eccentric hair.

Look, Buster, a pipe is NOT a style accessory.
Even while playing dungeons and dragons.
Or any other role playing game.

But for them it doesn't have to be a nice churchwarden, well-made, of good quality briar. It's just a prop, and consequently many of them will simply buy a crappy twelve dollar Eastern European pearwood pipe.
And the tobacco MUST smell Elvish, or Middle-Earthian.

[There's a product called 'Hobbit Weed' that capitalizes on that; two parts Black Cavendish Aromatic (vanilla), one part Lane's Very Cherry, and one part Sutliff 1M (more vanilla). If that does not please them, they will probably try 'Coffee-Toffee'. What matters is the visual of them being Tolkienesque.]


If there was such a place as The Shire, with hairy legged short people and visiting magicians, it would have a general store.

That also carried tobacco.

No, not any aromatics. No 'Peaches 'n Cream', 'Vanilla-toffee Cavendish', 'Mango Melba Blend', or 'Chocolate Whiskey Torte'.


Instead:

Capstan (a good reliable flake), Rattrays (a dozen very decent blends, from full Oriental to old-fashioned Virginias), a few Wessex tins, a few Dunhills, some McClellands and Greg Pease mixtures, Samuel Gawith products, and about a dozen others. Latakia blends, matured flue-cured tobacco with Perique, sliced coins. If you cannot find something worth smoking in that selection of thirty or so very nice tobaccos, maybe you are just not trying.
Too damned picky and fruity-looped perhaps?
A queer fish, with lousy tastes?

Mixture 79? Cherry?

Pervert!


Your tea is probably fruit-flavoured too. And there is a Halloween syrup in your Starbucks frappy.

You know, years ago people looked askance at tattoos and piercings.
You'll probably regret those when you finally grow up. Care to guess what old-age, saggy wrinkles, and liver spots, do to a highly individualistic multi-coloured Japonesque dragon?

Gandalf The Grey would assuredly rip your sophomoric icky-poo pretentiousness all to shreds.


He drank his coffee black and bitter, hated rooibos pumpkin spice tea or cinnamon-apple nectar, and smoked Samuel Gawith Black XX twist or Brown Rope No. 4. Because that was all he could get when travelling among the savage Orcs and Maoris. And that cheap-ass common clay churchwarden was only because he couldn't pack his lovely Upshalls, Sasienis, Charatans, or Castellos. Certainly not the prized silver banded GBD Rhodesian, nor the Patent Number Dunhills, or the Comoy London Prides and Blue Ribands.

When all this is over, he is going to retire to someplace where there are no buggery hobbits, chuck the churchwarden on the compost heap, pull out a Republic-Era Peterson, and smoke Gawith's Best Brown Flake, Golden Glow, or Full Virginia. Maybe even Orlik's Golden Sliced.

He's also going to get a haircut and trim the bushy beard. Because he's sick and tired of looking like an artist or a hippie.


And dress like you're normal, for crap's sake!




Pipe club meeting coming up.
Should be interesting.





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