BOOMER COMFORTS

Because of the weather, as well as a keen desire to remain comfortable for the rest of the night, I decided to not go out on the weekly pubcrawl yesterday. Fifty degrees and wet.
Yeah, no. Beastly weather! Expect a strongly worded letter to the editor!

Teatime had found me in a downpour after leaving my bank. When I got to the bakery it was merely a drizzle, but the gutters were still overflowing from earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the place was nearly empty.

One curry puff and two cups of tea later I was out under an awning lighting up my pipe. An extraordinarily good smoke. Very fine tobacco, and not a person nearby bellyaching about how I'm ruining their lungs go puff elsewhere you horrid old boomer. The type of person for whom the phrase "go stuff a sock in it" was invented.

So it was a lovely afternoon. Despite blue finger tips because of Raynaud's phenomenon. One which bears repeating during daylight hours when it rains again, assuming that we never reach the freezing point of water here.

There are two Big Ben apple-shaped pipes in my collection, both were bought in the same year two decades ago. They are excellent smokes, and I would be hard put to decide which one is better, the smooth with two-tone staining, or the sandblast pictured above.
They would be splendid with a cup of milk-tea, smoked indoors.

There was a cup of tea. Two of them in fact. One clear pale amber standard restaurant tea, one strong and bracing HK milk tea. But of course the pipe was smoked outside.
Beaky white dude in foul weather, scaring the kiddies.


They treat me well at that bakery. Which I can't quite understand, because I am not a particularly nice person, more of a grumbly old coot. But I guess that as a Cantonese speaker I am in a way more familiar, an ambulatory landmark, so to speak.


Startled two elderly Caucasians on the way in.
They were sheltering from the storm.
Probably lost.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================