BREAKFAST DURING THE APOCALYPSE

Teachers have been using Zoom to interact with their students during the current crisis, and many companies have requested their staff to work from home and video conference. And while it's a darn good thing that none of that applies to me, I've been thinking about what people could observe if it were otherwise.

I always shave and wash regularly, and am neatly dressed. I am not lounging around in my boxers eating crunchy-poofs and huffing a doobie.
A hot beverage and a pipe, yes.

But now would be the perfect time to smoke aromatic pipe tobaccos of which I normally disapprove, and from which I vociferously abstain.
Feh, pollution!

Don't know which one, though. There's still that stash of unopened tins of Erinmore Flake, enough to last a year, which according to many health authorities is utterly tempting to young people and that's why we want to ban all flavoured tobacco products lest the little shits end up imitating grumpy old coots out of sheer hero-worship or something, maybe they wanna be Gandalf or a Hobbit. But there aren't any kids nearby to tempt.
So it would be wasted.


"Come here, little girl, do you want to smell like Bilbo Baggins? Of course you do!"


Alas, you can never look like him, because you don't have bandy legs and hairy feet, or an expression on your face remarkably like a French Bulldog, and you are by no means leprechaunian in any way, in fact you remind me of nothing so much as a Hello Kitty dweeb, but indeed the character in question was short, probably squeaked a lot, and did smoke a pipe.

[Hobbit's Weed, a famous mixture from a long-gone tobacconist, consists of two parts BCA, one part Lane's Very Cherry, and one part Sutliff 1M. It is ferociously aromatic.
Not my cup of tea.]

The main problem with a city-wide lockdown ("shelter in place") is that it's so hard to be a bad example for the young. As the smell of an aromatic pipe tobacco naturally is. They know that generations of whiskey-soaked old farts with bad social habits and raggy haircuts smoked that crap.
And they want to grow up exactly like that.


"Come here little girl, I can make some fried noodles with veggies, hot sauce, and porky bits. And a fried egg! Sorry, we didn't stock up on bacon or fatty sausages, and there's no black pudding..... but this tea is strong enough to put hair on your chest!"


Sadly, I realize that even during the best of times, I'd be perfectly horrid at being a bad example.

Neatly dressed. Shaven. Clean. Hair and beard trimmed like a civilized person. A briar that I've had for years and maintained properly, filled with carefully curated tobaccos, sensible blended. And a cup of tea.
All I have to tempt you is delicious cookies.
With apricot and raspberry filling.
You're bored. I can tell.



There is ONE pipe-tobacco that's rather evil, though. An unopened tin of a mixture that smells remarkably like an old fashioned after shave that a barber in a western town might splash on the rugged cow pokes among his customers after they've washed and had a trim. But I'm scared to open it, and there's far too much back-story there for a little head to absorb.


Breakfast today was strong coffee and a few cookies. Most of the time I do not eat so early in the day. But I felt like smoking a pipe, and one should abstain from tobacco on an empty stomach.

TOBACCO INDEX


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