Lovely Fags

[Accident Prone]

18 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

I'll never vape, as that's for nonces.

Highlighting this so it isn't lost. My dad vapes, my step mom vapes, my wife vapes. All of them picked up the plastic stick to stop smoking cigs and instead of gradually coming off vapes to stop smoking anything at all, they've just stuck to a new, less cool-looking gross habit instead. I've got Yewtree on the line, I will bring them to justice.

[SuperBacon]

10 minutes ago, Accident Prone said:

Highlighting this so it isn't lost. My dad vapes, my step mom vapes, my wife vapes. All of them picked up the plastic stick to stop smoking cigs and instead of gradually coming off vapes to stop smoking anything at all, they've just stuck to a new, less cool-looking gross habit instead. I've got Yewtree on the line, I will bring them to justice.

Together we'll make sure these watermelon cloud huffing perverts are put under the jail.

[Carbomb]

Used to smoke cigars/cigarillos. If I was feeling flush, I'd go to a humidor in Soho and get Cohibas (the big spicy ones that Castro smoked), Romeo y Julietas, or Partagas. Not very frequently, though.

For bog-standard, regular smoking, it'd be Cafe Cremes, preferably the Oriental Spice ones (they got discontinued) or Blues. There was also Al Capone "Sweets", which were dipped in cognac - now they just have cognac-flavoured filters (filters on a cigar, what's the point?).

Then I had to have a cancerous lump removed from my bladder back in 2010, and that was it. I have smoked one since then, at the wedding of one of my oldest friends, but that's the level of special it needs to be for me to break the embargo.

[gmoney]

4 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Used to smoke cigars/cigarillos. If I was feeling flush, I'd go to a humidor in Soho and get Cohibas (the big spicy ones that Castro smoked), Romeo y Julietas, or Partagas. Not very frequently, though. 

Never liked cigars really, but you have reminded me that with my first ever paycheque at the age of 16 I bought Championship Manager 3 and a big cigar, one of the ones that comes in a metal tube. It just felt like that was the best way to celebrate.

[Carbomb]

1 minute ago, gmoney said:

Never liked cigars really, but you have reminded me that with my first ever paycheque at the age of 16 I bought Championship Manager 3 and a big cigar, one of the ones that comes in a metal tube. It just felt like that was the best way to celebrate.

They are divisive, no doubt about that. To be honest, I was in my early twenties when I started, and I primarily did it to fit in with my uni mates, who smoked like chimneys (Sovereigns were the burn of choice). I've never liked cigarettes, and, it turns out, I do like the taste of cigars. Not a fan of Hamlets, though.

[SaitoRyo]

I've never smoked an actual cigarette, but I do also enjoy a cigarillo like you @Carbomb.

Only have them every now and again, and almost always while social drinking. They have these nice flavour activation ones over here where you squeeze a little capsule at the end. Can get ten for the equivalent of a few quid and they'll last me an age. The blueberry one is my jam. 

[SuperBacon]

@Carbomb @gmoney just reminded me that when I went to Cuba, all I wanted to do was try a cigar, as obviously its the place of origin. Got to see someone roll mine and put it in the tube which was cool, and bought back a fair few Cohibas and Romeo and Juliets (which I was sweating bullets about going through customs as I was convinced I'd be caught, jailed and made an example of. I'm still not sure if it's just illegal to take them to the States)

Tried one while I was there on a night where I was drinking white rum neat and threw up everywhere and passed out in the swamp lands where the alligators are. Smart.

I was also obsessed with trying out filter less cigarettes like you'd see in old movies, and found a packet left on a table at the hotel, and sparked one up. Absolutely revolting, but then I've never liked rollies etc 

On top of all of this, I bought back 400 of what I thought were cigarettes (they were being hawked outside the airport, can't remember the brand) but they turned out to be cigarillos, basically a cigar in a fag innit? Not for me Clive. Couldn't even give them away.

Having said that they did go in spliffs so we didn't have to worry about that for a while.

Despite my smoking mishaps, Cuba was amazing. The smell of the cigar smoke everywhere was genuinely lovely and it evokes memories every time I smell one.

Edit: just remembered I saw this recently. Imagine the smell of the gaff!

 

Edited February 10 by SuperBacon
Got a light?

[gmoney]

You've also reminded me of the time my dad brought back about 1000 Kruger cigarettes back from Lanzarote, the cheapest brand he could find. Got a chest infection after about 3 days. 

[Carbomb]

12 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

Got to see someone roll mine and put it in the tube which was cool, and bought back a fair few Cohibas and Romeo and Juliets (which I was sweating bullets about going through customs as I was convinced I'd be caught, jailed and made an example of. I'm still not sure if it's just illegal to take them to the States)

 

Yeh, no need to worry on that score. Like I say, I used to go to a humidor in Soho - they exclusively sold Cuban cigars.

[wordsfromlee]

37 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

Together we'll make sure these watermelon cloud huffing perverts are put under the jail.

Vapists who think that sucking on a usb stick is acceptable behaviour should be in prison.  
 

I understand people who do it as an aid to quit smoking, but the ones who take it up having never smoked before are the real deviants. 

[Gus Mears]

Loved me a cigar. Stanza di Sigari in Boston is one of my favourite bars in the world- an underground cave with a smoking licence, sport on the telly and no organised fun - and I remember getting through three cigars on a frigid St Patrick's Day 2017, including a La Flor Dominica Digger, a 9 inch behemoth which took hours to smoke. I think I chased that with an entire pack of Camel Blue. That day probably singlehandedly took a decade off my life.

[Joe Blog]

I started socially/drunk smoking in my late teens and it developed into full time smoking pretty quickly. I smoked ‘properly’ from about 18-26. One of my close friends developed throat and chest cancer and after a short battle died, this put the shitters up me enough to go cold turkey and I didn’t touch another cigarette until I was 35 and I split with my then wife.

I smoked again for about a year but it was never as much fun as I had kids and was constantly worries about getting cancer so I went cold turkey again. I’m lucky in the sense that I can stop whenever I chose to.

Miss it every day though, the smell still makes me want one, unless i’m running in which case I despise running through a cloud of smoke. Nothing beats the feeling of sitting during golden hour with a tab in one hand and a scalding coffee in the other. Marlboro Golds were my cig of choice. I also smoked  Stuveysant Blue which are absolutely divine but sadly not sold in many places in the UK though. 
 

Never vaped, wronguns.

 

[BomberPat]

I smoked for a couple of years as a teenager, was never a proper smoker. I was always skint and too shy to cadge fags off people, so I would always rather have saved the money for booze rather than blowing it on cigs. I was always shit at rolling my own, too.

I wouldn't turn down a cigar under the right circumstances, though. I went to Sark when they were looking to introduce the smoking ban there. There were only two proper pubs on the island, and one of them was aggressively anti-ban, so the bar was covered in flyers about it - their logic was basically that if there are only two pubs, let people smoke in one of them if they want to, and not in the other. Just for the novelty of still being allowed to smoke indoors, some years after the smoking ban was introduced in the UK (and a couple of years before that in Jersey), I bought everyone in the group a cigar, and that's quite a lovely memory.

The early days of the smoking ban in Jersey were hilarious. A few places I know phased out smoking quite smartly ahead of the ban - creating designated smoking areas, then only allowing smoking in those areas between certain times, and so on - but most just absolutely panicked and tried to come up with every argument they could why they should be exempt, desperately looking for any solution. One pub found a loophole that smoking was still allowed indoors as part of a theatrical experience, and spent ages trying to figure out if they could somehow designate half of their pub as a kind of performance space, which was such an obvious non-starter. Then a bunch of my mates were all trying to find ways around it too, getting into shit early e-cigarettes, or a brief period where a load of goths in their late teens and early twenties were suddenly getting really into snuff or those horrible chew pouches. 

 

One last Channel Island fags anecdote that I love, though - a lot of people used to fly in and out of Jersey regularly for work, some people as often as once a week. I used to fly in and out for various reasons once a month or so for a few years. Other people would routinely pop over to France for a day trip, usually load up on cheap booze at the hypermarket and duty-free fags at the harbour. Either way, every time you were going anywhere, you'd either buy a case to flog when you got back, or you'd have mates hitting you up to put in their orders.

When lockdown happened, every supermarket on the island sold out of fags within about two weeks. They couldn't figure it out, because they'd ordered the same amount as usual, but just got completely rinsed, and they weren't seeing that replicated in mainland UK stores, so it's not like the stress of lockdown had turned more people on to smoking. Eventually they realised that they had been historically underordering for demand for years, because so many people were getting all of their fags through duty-free, and cutting off-island travel killed that.

[Carbomb]

30 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I wouldn't turn down a cigar under the right circumstances, though. I went to Sark when they were looking to introduce the smoking ban there. There were only two proper pubs on the island, and one of them was aggressively anti-ban, so the bar was covered in flyers about it - their logic was basically that if there are only two pubs, let people smoke in one of them if they want to, and not in the other. Just for the novelty of still being allowed to smoke indoors, some years after the smoking ban was introduced in the UK (and a couple of years before that in Jersey), I bought everyone in the group a cigar, and that's quite a lovely memory.

I know you're not actually from the CI, so apologies if I'm expecting too much from you info-wise, but I was under the impression that Sark, like Jersey, has its own government, and therefore could defy having a smoking ban if they wished?

30 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The early days of the smoking ban in Jersey were hilarious. A few places I know phased out smoking quite smartly ahead of the ban - creating designated smoking areas, then only allowing smoking in those areas between certain times, and so on - but most just absolutely panicked and tried to come up with every argument they could why they should be exempt, desperately looking for any solution. One pub found a loophole that smoking was still allowed indoors as part of a theatrical experience, and spent ages trying to figure out if they could somehow designate half of their pub as a kind of performance space, which was such an obvious non-starter. Then a bunch of my mates were all trying to find ways around it too, getting into shit early e-cigarettes, or a brief period where a load of goths in their late teens and early twenties were suddenly getting really into snuff or those horrible chew pouches. 

The exemptions are an odd thing. That humidor in Soho that I mentioned earlier - Casa de Havana - was one of the few places in London I knew that had smoking indoors, long after the ban.

According to the owner, the exemption was granted on the strict provision that they could prove that 100% of their revenue was from tobacco sales, and that they weren't selling drinks or food, and this was true.

What was also true, and also clever and cheeky, was that the owner also ran the restaurant/bar next door, and, to enable his humidor customers to drink while smoking, simply had a connecting door at the back of the premises. You could go in, buy a cigar, leave it with the cashier, go and buy a drink next door, then come back with it to smoke. 

[HandsomeButchIII]

On 50g of GV a week, as I have been for a while. Years in fact. I get them at cost from people holidaying and me holidaying myself, so don't pay more than a tenner a week. It's 40 quid at least for the same in a shop which is criminal. When I was on the Tailormades about 20-25 years ago I always smoked Royals. You got more from a pub vendor machine, 19 as opposed to 16, and from the shop it was 24 rather than 20 for about 3.50 to 4. If I didn't smoke I'd have no hobbies left.