Cigar Thoughts

Today saw a long day of work, then a good couple of hours at the gym. So, rather typically, I have just cooked myself a paella, and am working away at a good bottle of chilean wine whilst chewing--this just seems vulgar, but my neighbours can't take smoke-- a Por Larranaga cigar given as part of a set by a friend. What a life. Still I enjoy my work, so I feel no guilt.

I love a good cigar though am fairly sure that my heart couldn't take too many. There's a box of Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur to my left, on a table beneath the image of a lovely Italian woman I once stayed in Versailles with; and in a dusty box I have a series of maturing Upmann signatures, including a brace of Henry Clay. Their eponymous hero is someone I'm coming to like by the day, never having much been taken with Andrew Jackson. Cigars are such a civilised pleasure, cherry and wood scents mixing and merging with the acidulous tang of their aftertaste.

It's what a cigar does to my head that attracts me most. When I was younger, and this goes especially for the Cuban variants, my poor brain was subject to shots as metaphorically bad as those of Lee Oswald from the Oxygen deprivation that smoking things like this inflicted on my parietal lobes. Things were not helped by my youthful taste for rum and blackcurrant, which has morphed into a claret fetish. I remember the tastes of women I loved and the rum and black both stroking and stinging my lips...ah well. I am sure that I have more improving things to put myself to sleep with tonight.

There were very cold mornings my skin seems to still remember at my lovely granddad's, when I walked the early morning streets of Corby to a bakery and back in an attempt to make the pounding go away and to get some burnt Scottish rolls to butter with difficulty in the freeze. That doesn't happen any more either. Time has its ways.

As I get older, a good cigar seems to lay the lines for the hangover to run proper thoughts through in the morning, perhaps half out of guilt, of consciousness of mortality. A woman I loved very much once called me a sensual man, albeit in a hotel in the morning, partly as a reason to leave at dawn; but it's really brought home by the twisting of smoke in the lungs. Why is it that the noxious weed should have such an effect on my mind? Is it that thoughts are just the backwash of vocalised things, and that my mind will soon have its coughs?

Yes, I know how bad it is for me. But look, I live in London and I love it. I breathe in photocopier fumes and the carbon monoxide and the detritus of the underground of the world each day, and I have no real wish to live beyond my time. Were I one of those demented improvers determined to wander round pubs with a nod to Cromwell, removing wine glasses and feeling righteous, I might condemn myself. As it stands, I feel as fallen as any Francis Thompson character, descending down through the nights and days of memory. No hounds follow me, though, and I have no fear of the footsteps a god who could turn water into wine. It's one more reason to love him, frankly.

This is a personal blog. Confabulation and nonsense abound, but if you don't like it, click off. If you do, though, I could wish you worse, this October night on the falling slope of our long crisis than a good meal and a fine cigar. Good luck to you. Puff away, and think of the bonfires to come.

Henry Clay was a whiz with the fiddle. Here'a a video of a beautiful Celtic woman, with yellow hair, of the sort that Yeats wrote of as making every mother's son mad, playing 'Ashoken Farewell'.