CHEESE, SCOTSMEN, AND QUININE

Today was a meeting of the local pipe club, and my friend who had an operation and is under doctor's orders to pee a lot -- excessively, for several weeks -- was there. He does not like to pee so much, especially because it's hard to wake up in the middle of the night to do so.
I offered that waking up to yank out nostril hairs works for me. He's older, and has more nostril hair (at least I think he does, because he's older), but that doesn't work for him.

Much of the conversation at the meeting revolved around old Charatan pipes, and cheese. There was cheese. Brie or Camembert should be runny, even deliquescent, as you know.

What with the inclement weather, the sports game on teevee, and the approach of Christmas, it was a sparsely attended meeting. With, consequently, too much wine.

So really, it was a splendid success.

Over the weekend I've been smoking Rattray's Old Gowrie in some of my Petersons a lot. It's a good all day tobacco that used to be found wherever Englishmen went; the Burmese jungle, outlying districts in Assam and Bengal, Peiping during the warlord period or Chekiang if they worked for China Customs, Kenya and or the Tanganyika territory, rubber plantations in Perak and Selangor ..... Uppercrustian British bachelors posted to distant hellholes are hard to find nowadays. The last such I know stopped smoking a pipe five or six years ago, having gotten married, and one of them passed away locally two years ago, also no longer single. Must be something in the water. Sadly, a tobacconist or general provisioner who carries a full stock of Scots tobaco blends is also harder to find.


The chap who survived the camps in Hong Kong died suddenly several years ago, his lovingly tended garden gone to weed alerted us that something had happened.
His pipe tobacco preferences were a little eccentric. Irish even.

Sad. We had often talked about Stanley Fort.


There are not many people with whom I can discuss Hong Kong. One I see often when I'm in Marin smokes cigars, as does the sporadic visitor who usually stays over there (Kowloon), but he's more of a decent weather visitor because his long suffering Cantonese wife prefers sitting outside. The first mentioned is still a bachelor. It's not really a life-style choice.


To the best of my knowledge I am the only bachelor among the attendees of our little get-together. But not English. The chap who mentioned Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon much earlier in the day is both, but a cigar smoker. We had spoken briefly about blackwater fever (a haemolytic ailment caused by malaria and triggered by overmuch use of quinine as prophylaxis over the years), which is why habitual consumption of gin and tonics might not be such a good idea. Probably best stick with Scotch and water.

By the way: I am probably the only one us who knows how to make a gin pahit.


I swilled tea all day. It helps against the weather.



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