Pipe Smoking and the Macintosh
The great Spanish author and philosopher Joaquin Verdaguer once wrote:
"We all recall our adolescent days when we put a light to our first cigarette, followed by the inevitable sickness but dampened by the elevated feeling of really belonging to grown-ups now.
Some smokers remain on that level for life, while some of them graduate to cigar smokers and a minority make it to the Olympus of The Pipe Connoisseur.
Really, could you liken the wailing of a new-born baby to the accomplishment of an aria, performed by Maria Callas?
To smoke means The Art of Smoking a PIPE".
So, by Verdaguer's definition, I am a smoker, while cigarette-burners are non-smokers!
Unfortunately only by his definition.

Never having smoked a cigarette in my life, I have always enjoyed the pleasure of a pipe, accompanied by coffee, to crown a good meal or, occasionally, while reading during a forced wait.
This has been so for the past 60 years of my life.
But things are changing, thanks to the cigarette addicts and their health problems.

Like pipe smokers, Mac users have always been almost near-religious followers of a minority cult they believed to be a superior alternative to the trend dictated by the powers of marketing.
The parallel does not end there.

As the minuscule elite of pipe smokers is about to be carried to oblivion by the hectic hysteria of the anti-smoking campaign, so are the Macintosh evangelists, waiting to be drowned in the vast ocean of Wintel world-wide standardisation.
I know, because I subscribe to both minorities.
Or rather: used to.
At the check-in for a flight to London I am greeted by pictograms of crossed out cigarettes. In flight, pipe smokers have been stamped out even before the chain-smoking cigarette addicts. None of us pipe smokers, I am sure, will mind that in the least.
Arriving at the London Heathrow terminal, the poor blokes again are asked to refrain from lighting their paper-wrapped smoking surrogate. When they finally manage to grab transport, be it tube, bus or taxi to their hotel, they are courteously asked by pictogram or in writing to refrain from "smoking"
As a pipe-smoker you do not object, because you smoke to enjoy, not because your inhaling habit dictates you to to so.
Nor does it matter that smoking is not allowed in most shops.
Since these lines were written, all public facilities were included in the witch hunt: Now you can no longer enjoy your cigar of your pipe along with your espresso after a good meal.
How long will it take, until the health police will visit to see if you are smoking at home? Will they revert to cutting off your lips, as I believe they did in the dark ages? So when can the moderate (pipe)-smoker light his briar in the land that once was foremost in the world in pipe-smoking?
Well thanks to the cigarette clan you may well forget it altogether. Thanks to those life-long beginners and their hysterical persuers you will find it increasingly difficult even to find a restaurant or a hotel room that will allow you to light your pipe.

A pipe is a work of art. You cherish yours for life. Each one in a collection has a character and a story of its own.
Over the years you develop something like a relationship with it. A cigarette, however, is like a whore. Once "used", you throw the "butt" away and forget you ever had it.
So life-long relationships are to be ended because the majority of "smokers" cannot differenciate between enjoyment and habit. There is a similarity here to drinking a fine bottle of wine with, or a glass of cognac, after dinner. The cigarette smokers of the alcoholic world are the "drinkers", who know neither how to enjoy nor when to stop.

An average pipe smoke lasts for at least 45 minutes. Way to long for the lifestyle of the cigarette smoker. Our hectic times just cannot accomodate that sort of leisure any more.

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