The last time I had a cigar I was
drunk and having a lively exchange of opinions with a policeman. Perhaps as a
result of this experience, or maybe because I’m trying to follow a health
regime that doesn’t include throat cancer, I have avoided smoking cigars during
my adult life.
And yet, what kind of lifestyle
column do we have if we never get to discuss the pleasure, the culture, the
rigmarole, the exclusivity, and the fantasy that accompanies the world of
cigars? Can it be that The Sharp End can have nothing to say about the world of
Coronas, Churchills, and Torpedoes?
And so here goes.
‘A woman is only a woman, but a
good cigar is a smoke’
Kipling’s line is the inevitable
place to start and is now thought to be unacceptably sexist. However, if you
read the whole poem, Britain’s first Nobel Laureate for Literature was offering
up a wry satire on young love, inspired by a real divorce suit brought by a new
wife over her husband’s cigar habit. It could be a modern City headline,
although the case that inspired the poem took place in 1885.
Kipling implied cigars were a
peculiarly male pleasure, but plenty of women enjoy and smoke cigars, and not
just in reworkings of Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen’.
I have a vivid recollection of
being in an informal late night meeting on the balcony of an Amsterdam hotel
where it became apparent that nearby was a monthly rendezvous of an Amsterdam
ladies’ cigar club.These were not ordinary women but the female scions of the
city’s leading families who added some music to their smoky evening by hiring a
soprano to sing excerpts from ‘Carmen’.
There came a point in the music
when men were necessary in a sexual way – and we, poor fellows, were the only
men available. Our cover was blown: La Diva sauntered across with a massive
smouldering cigar, she sat on my lap and sang:
‘One man talks well, the other’s
mum.
It’s the other one that I prefer.
He’s silent but I like his
looks.’
Yowzer! We nearly forgot whose
round it was.
But this is all too heady and
sensual. My favourite cigar places are the little plastic tents erected outside
hotels on Sylt – a windswept island in northern Germany favoured by German
finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and other members of the German elite with a
love of fresh air. To be honest, there is nothing to do on Sylt except eat,
drink and smoke, but if I needed a retreat to write a book then this would be
the wind-blasted, flat landscape I would hide myself in while I hammered at the
keyboard.
Sylt has the wildness and angst
necessary for great literature, but at the end of each tortuous typewriter day
you can drink any vintage of Cheval Blanc that takes your fancy and then find a
comfortable place for a smoke in one of the tents. It’s a rare place for the
perfect, delicate and knowing ritual of the cigar, a ritual beautifully
described by Kipling as:
‘Thought in the early morning,
solace in time of woes
Peace in the hush of the
twilight, balm ere my eyelids close’
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