BANKSIDE FLAKE

Fruity, earthy, faint perfume of terpeneol. Requires a second cup of coffee. Should I maybe mention the moorlands south of town where there are so many birds? There is a wine-like feel to the smoke. The tin-note is remarkably reminiscent of favourite bookshops and dark cafe ineriors, with a faint note of soggy peasant, perhaps grudgingly buying his daughter's high-school textbooks for the new school year. A wet beginning of the rainy season.

It is utterly impossible that the cigar shop next to Priem's on the Eindhovensche Weg would ever have recommended this; it would have been quite incomprehensible to them.
No refined flavourings of whiskey and wild honey have been added!
Or the other crap customary for Dutch tobaccos.
Chocolate, vanilla, caramel and rum.

This is a very likeable product, which I'm lazily letting smoke-curl over the rim of the bowl and toward my nostrils, as I snap at the poor Indian Spam-caller who had the balls to call me with something incomprehensible and allegedly related to the medical issues of old goats.

Damn', I would have enjoyed smoking this when I was still a young fellow, after school and relaxing by myself at Parsifal (I had a key), as the dull light of a November day faded into darkness, rain on the road outside, a giant pot of tea on the large table loaded with newspapers, magazines, and my algebra homework.

BANKSIDE
Fine flake tobacco

Tin blurb:
"From a bold, traditional canvas of Red and Bright Virginias and genuine St. James Perique emerge subtle, contrasting strokes of dark fire-cured Kentucky and Latakia tobaccos. Exotic, smoky undretones deepen and enrich notes of sweet cream and citrusy tang in this modernist reinterpretation of the archetypal Virginia/Perique flake."

From the Zeitgeist Collection by G. L. Pease.

The brights and reds dominate, shaded by the condimentals. The Perique is very faint; one wonders if it's even there. It is hard to call this a "Virginia Perique" mixture, because the interplay of two smoke-cured tobaccos adds levels that make it other than that.


NOTE: Just told 'Michael' calling about my "final expense" that I didn't need that, he was wasting his time, I was not dead. It must be horrible to be stuck in a phone-bank warehouse in buggery Andra Pradesh at over eighty degrees indoors because the air-con, if it exists, isn't working. Hot, sweaty, the chai wallah at the bus stop outside has fallen asleep dammit, there are flies buzzing about, there is no tobacco to smoke, and you have to call up senile Americans on the cusp of their demise to cheat them out of their burial expenses!

In San Francisco, where I live, it is currently mid to high fifties, and there is occasional rain. It was foggy, hazy, drizzly, misty when I got up this morning, and I needed an umbrella when outside walking with my pipe. I don't really like cold weather, but I don't dislike it.
Which hot weather I do.

Eindhoven and Valkenswaard are about six or seven degrees colder at present. I used to live there. I'm fairly certain that folks there don't receive calls from 'Mary' at "American Senior Citizens Care" informing them of a new state regulation bla bla bla.
A pox on her and her new state regulation!

Afterthought: I am not an old goat! Still fairly youngish, albeit more so in my own mind than my knees would admit. And I have NO intention of dying to please Spam callers from India.
I will at some point have a third cup of coffee and another bowl of Bankside.

Shan't answer the phone for the rest of the day.

TOBACCO INDEX


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