The Sunday Smoke

Tonight's cigar was what one reviewer has called a 'good, solid smoke', an H.Upmann signature. It was buttery, and began with caramel tastes, then slipped into a sort of marbled granite and acid flavour that was unusual, burning through its tan leaf quickly. As I wandered through the drizzle in Putney, streets and restaurants as is usual now almost bereft of people, it helped me think. If these words should fall upon the eye of the redneck sensualist who gave me these, I am truly grateful.

The synaesthesia cigars inspire is a revelation. This is not, I think, because the effect is unknown to me. It's because my body forgets. I wonder why that is. Letting smoke play about the palate is something most people rarely do these days, but it brings memories of situations in which an involuntary association--one I couldn't force--arose almost automatically.

When I was little, for instance, I used to help my paternal grandfather clear out the ashes in the house I later lived in and set the fire. It was layered in the normal way--rolled up copies of the Daily Mirror at the bottom, tight, crosswords all done and horse races all marked and run, a little wood he'd chopped himself out the back with a small blade that fit in the palm, and a few bits of coal.

Oddly, it would smell fresh to start with, and then, as flame later bit through the materials, the room would be marked by a increasing series of smells. Dust in the air and the polish my granny used liberally to make furniture shine, all burn. Sweetness and bitterness and cocoa and charcoal all rolled up and mixed with the golden virginia tobacco that seemed native to working class men at the time. I thought of St Peter talking of the end of time, when elements burn and the sky catches fire, and that makes me think of Rainer Maria Rilke on angels who

would come more fiercely to interrogate you,
And rush to seize you blazing like a star,
And bend you as if trying to create you,
And break you open, out of who you are.

Interrogating angels. You can tell Rilke was a lapsed barrister, or at least an advocate manque.

Where else would one smell smoke these days, in the cold? Perhaps nasal vessels constrict in such circumstances, and change the way air and smoke are taken in. Bonfires are practically banned, and whatever the Daily Mail thinks, our cities are not burning so regularly that people might become inured to the smell. Perhaps at barbecues. That runs against my argument, though. Who wouldn't be associating the smell and taste of charcoal--especially given the way people cook in this country--with imagery at a barbecue?

H.Upmann cigars have a modest but surprising range when one smokes them. I once had a similar effect from some cheap American cigars that I smoked in a garden in Baltimore, beneath a tree Al Capone planted, many many moons ago. The friend I smoked them with had become a little addicted to other forms of smoke in Vietnam, during the war, but always had a stock of beer, Boston Creme doughnuts, and cigars on hand for male visitors. He was, and so far as I know is, a good man.

Those mad combinations played a similar game in my mouth, but not in such a subtle way. I'm much older and I'm sure I'd find the mixture vulgar now anyway, though it didn' matter to my friend. He'd been with Calley's group, and had got out before the local commander was convicted of war crimes for a mess of the higher-ups' explicit making. He wouldn't have noticed the excess of the tastes, and his broken Virginia poor boy's heart would not have cared.

The reviewer I quoted was right; cocoa and caramel to start with, then an increasingly bitter prune taste, then a sort of sensual knot of acid that made me think of a mahogany bar marbled with yellow streaks beneath glass.

One didn't have to think of Sigmund Freud fleeing Hitler and clicking a wooden palate support on the train because his cigar habit ate his mouth to hear my body warning me about the brand. It's a sign of a well brought up mind, I suppose, that the brain and sternum smoke are wrapping its poison around resort to the imagery of phlegm on a bar to warn you what's really going on beneath the reverie.

I wonder if it's the small draft of Jameson's Whiskey I'm washing the final, unexpected taste of warm mint away with or just my natural pretension that makes me think, after that cigar, of Baudelaire lining the walls of his poetry with paeans to his mistress;

En Vertigineuse Douceur!
A travers ces levres nouvelles,
Plus eclatantes et plus belles,
T'infuser mon venin, ma soeur!

Too many exclamation marks in that part of Fleurs du Mal. And ultimately, of course, it's misogynist nonsense, since I'm not sure how many women should consent to the edges of a new wound being characterised as new lips into which one could drip poison, or indeed, how many men should be allowed to wander the streets thinking of the lines. Many more cigars like this, and I'll get sectioned on account of French modernism, provided I haven't disappeared up myself first.

Buy this cigar and smoke it if you fancy a nice reliable smoke and don't care about your lungs. I did go to the gym today, didn't smoke all of it, and anyway, am conscious that the world is burning, life is short, and we are plunging into the Great Deflation. Don't write in and tell me what lung disease, or heart attacks, or cancer do. I have seen them separately and often kill people I love. On the other hand, If you agree, light one up on a drizzly night and forget it all for a while--and return to a warm whiskey.

Normal service will be resumed later. The picture at the top of the blog is Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer.