FABULOUS PASTRY!

In a previous post I gibbered a bit about a heatwave in Shanghai and people running naked through the streets there screaming about evil Republican plots. It appears that I may have stretched the truth a bit. They are not naked. Perhaps they are wearing fashionable evening clothes. While sweltering limply in half light. Tasteful. It is Shanghai, after all, and unlike other parts of the Far East they wouldn't be caught dead naked.


It is too hot there to enjoy their food. Way too hot.

One hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

I myself am not so fortunate, and catching me naked would take a miracle. It is not sweltering in San Francisco but frightfully cold. And I'm thinking that after lunch I should probably go get some milk tea and a pastry while warmly dressed, with a pipe and some tobacco in my coat pocket for afterwards. As yet it's just a thought.

It's barely sixty degrees here.

This is NOT a fabulous pastry.

The illustration above was more or less copied from a photograph accompanying an article about the unseasonable heat in Shanghai. Warmest May in decades. She is clearly wiping her delicate forehead while exclaiming in a hoarse whisper "alack, this heat, I'm limp!" So of course you can understand why I may have assumed that at some point people there might run through the streets having heat hysterics. Dramatically.

It's a natural assumption.


On the one hand I wouldn't mind at all if it were ten or twenty degrees warmer, but on the other, I can always put on a sweater and have a pastry while thinking of limp limp fingers touching a pearled brow. And have pipe-full of good tobacco afterwards.
Which is what I intend to do.

I've been enjoying Fourth Generation 'Resolution', a limited edition flake compounded for Stokkebye by Cornell & Diehl. Very nice. There's a picture of a schooner which sank in 1834 on the label, drowning every man on board. I'm not entirely clear what something that happened 189 years ago has too do with some good tobacco, but nevermind.
I'll smoke a bowl of it while thinking about delicate limp hands.
Conceivably offering me a pastry.


It's very nice tobacco.



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