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ritual of loosening and shredding a pressed wafer of tobacco is almost as important as the inhalation of smoke itself.
    There is an excellent line in Ian Fleming’s last Bond novel,
The Man with the Golden Gun
: ‘The best drink in the day,’ he observes, ‘is just before the first one.’ So it is with my habit. The best smoke for me is the one I have in my head while I am priming the pipe and preparing to puff.
    Just as I am about to pack the bowl and fire up I hear above me the thudding of bare feet on floorboards.
    Cormorant.
    With an exasperated sigh, I lay down the pipe and next to it the tangle of freshly rubbed tobacco. As I ascend the stairs I hear stifled giggles and slaps, snaps and whispers. I stride in and switch on the lights. A ritualized fight is in progress, now frozen in the sudden illumination. School ties are being cracked and flicked like whips. I remember these fights from my own dormitory days.
    ‘Silence! Back into bed all of you. Right this minute!’
    A scramble as they leap into their beds and instantly pretend to be asleep.
    I switch out the lights. ‘One more sound from this dormitory and whoever is responsible will be for the whack. Do you understand? For the whack. I mean it.’
    Back in the study I note with disappointment that the two or three minutes that the ball of tobacco has spent on my desk has been enough to dry its loosened shreds a little. I fill the bowl and press the tobacco down with my thumb. Still moist enough to pack well. Firm, with a hint of springiness.
    Now comes the moment my brain and lungs have been aching for.
    Only Swan Vestas will do at this point, no other incendiary device is quite up to the mark: not specialized pipe-smoker’s lighters, however cunning and elaborate, not Bryant and May matches, not a Bic, Clipper, Zippo, Ronson, Calibri, Dupont or Dunhill, excellent in their own ways as they all may be. Swan Vestas are
real
matches, which is to say you can scrape their magenta heads against any rough surface, not just the shiny brown strips to which the safety match is restricted. You can use a brick in the wall or, like a cowboy, the heel of your boot. The sandpaper provided on the yellow Swan Vesta box is golden, and nothing else scratches like it. I pull the match towards me. I know that one is supposed to strike away in case fragments of burning match-head fly into the face, but I prefer the scooping inwards motion, the way one finishes by bringing the flaring match up before one’s eyes.
    The sulphurous incense tingles in my nostrils as I tip the lit match at an angle over the bowl and then slowly flatten it out. Each inhalation sucks the flame downwards over the prepared tobacco which fizzes and bubbles in welcome, its moist freshness imparting a thick sweetness to the smoke. Finally, when the whole surface area is lit and just before my fingers burn, three flicks of the wrist extinguish the match. It tinkles as it hits the glass of the ashtray. Matches charred almost to the end have always been a revealing clue for Columbos and Sherlocks. ‘A pipe smoker did this deed, Watson, you mark my words …’
    I am puffing now. One, two, three, four, five draws on the pipe, smacking the lips at the side of the mouth. Each hard suck stokes up the boiler so that, on the sixth or seventh pull, I can breathe in a whole lungful. The hot smoke instantly penetrates the bronchioles and alveoli of the lungs, sending its gift of nicotine rushing through the blood to the brain. So powerful a hit can cause giddiness and sweating in even the most hardened pipe smoker. But the bang deep inside, the grateful surge of encephalinsand endorphins, the thudding kick to the system followed by the sweet electric buzz and hum as the body’s benign pharmacopoeia is released in a single torrent – what are coughs, nausea, burns to the tongue and mouth, bitter tar in the spittle and the slow degradation of pulmonary capacity compared to that spinning, pulsing burst of love, that