The joys of snuff

With that title, I expect for some time we’ll get disappointed google searchers hitting this page; internet users are a weird lot. An old post about taxpayer-funded elective cosmetic surgery entitled “Poor women with large tattooed breasts” consistently scored the highest hits ranking of any page on the blog. So to clarify for any puzzled visitors, this post is about powdered cured tobacco.

I took a complete break from smoking about seven or eight years ago and have never craved one since. Physically. Not smoking takes no effort at all, but Oh how I regret having foregone the pleasure of smoking; I loved smoking. Really enjoyed it. If I live to 75, I’m going to start again. Before the smoking ban here this year, I loved to spend an hour or two in the local Gasthaus just for the smell of the dense clouds of cigarette smoke around the bar, a delicious fragrancing of my clothes that I would sniff nostalgically for the rest of the day. Well, Nicotine has been a good friend to me since I was 15, with me at all the big moments in life. So when I took a break from fags, I switched to snuff. Made in old English snuff mill, a Northern one, that cures and grinds Virginia tobacco.

It’s not some eccentricity for public showing-away but a connection with a lifelong physiological partnership. The Nicotine is just a fraction of that from smoking, the dopamine effect imperceptible but the connection remains. With the benefit that one can take snuff when seated on an aircraft, at a restaurant table, in a bar. It confuses the bansturbators – nobody has told them to ban snuff. And sales are so inconsequential that HM Treasury can hardly be bothered to tax it – a 25g tin costs about £2.80 and lasts about a month.

There’s only one drawback. As a seasoned snuffer, my sneeze reaction is pretty well under control; one intakes snuff like sniffing a flower, not snorting coke. One of my few pleasures in life is agreeing to let coke-heads take a pinch; inevitably they suck it straight into the upper septum where it takes about a second before leaving them in tear-streaming agony, puce-faced and contorted with pain. But sometimes – when out walking, when in the supermarket – the residual snuff induces a sneeze. No problem, as I always have a snuff-kerchief to hand.

But boy. The looks of fear and horror from anyone within ten metres. A couple of times I’ve done that little pantomimey thing of shaking the head and waving the hand ‘no’, though I don’t think they were convinced.