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发表于 2012-7-5 04:08:03
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回复 5# kllart 的帖子
印象中应该是 St. James, 在过去烟草艺术的黄金时期，是个集散地。但遗憾英国本人从没去过，所以都是道听途说。
在《卫报》网站还搜到一篇有趣的相关文章，有兴趣可看看：
Christmas cigars, Balkan Sobranie and the last days of tobacco
The atmosphere of a golden age clings to Edward S Sahakian's shop in St James's
In Britain, snorting cocaine is now a far more easily taken pleasure than smoking tobacco and it is surprising to remember that until late in the last century I used to buy my father cigars for Christmas. There are now perhaps only half a dozen tobacconists in London - proper tobacconists, that is, stocked with more than Silk Cut and throwaway lighters. Holborn has one, and there's another in Mount Street, Mayfair, and Smith's snuff shop is still open for business in the Charing Cross Road. In other British cities they have been wiped out completely. What you might call the remaining concentration of London tobacconists - two shops out of three or four times as many 20 years ago - lies in St James's, that little territory between Piccadilly and The Mall. The Dunhill store, which to the affluent smoker in far-flung Hong Kong or Buenos Aires was once a place of pilgrimage, now sells everything but tobacco, perhaps even sideboards. "No, we don't do tobacco for more than three years now," said the Eastern European assistant at the door. "You must try that place across the street."I walked to Davidoff, on the corner of Jermyn and St James's streets, wondering about the ritual of Christmas cigar-smoking. What brand had I given Dad? Perhaps Wills' Whiffs? Schimmelpennincks certainly - not fat cigars but thin Dutch cheroots (a cheroot has both ends clipped) that came in long packets of five. And then, when I began to earn more, actual cigars in those wooden boxes sealed with old-fashioned certificates and stamps that you had to slit open with a knife. Did my father, a pipe-smoker, even like cigars? It used to be said of Harold Wilson that in private he was a serious cigar smoker who smoked a pipe only for public effect, pipes suggesting reliability, but I suspect that in Dad it was the other way around, that he smoked his Christmas cigars because for a day or two it suggested an equally false recklessness and luxury.
At Davidoff, I sat in an armchair and looked around the shop as I waited for the owner, Mr Edward S Sahakian. Smoking, like the surgery that often follows it, has spawned a whole array of instruments: pipes, pipe-cleaners, pipe-racks, pipe-knives, spills to be lit from open fires, cigar-cutters, cigar-boxes, humidors, ashtrays. The effect at Davidoff is rather like a museum of vanishing pleasure, with a tub of long-handled shoe horns also on display as a sort of memento mori, a reminder that smoking makes breath shorter and arteries harder so that in the end getting a shoe on is a feat of bending and straining accompanied possibly by regret about so many cigars. You never think about these things until you are 60, when suddenly you do, but Mr Sahakian, who must be about that age, bore no hint of this as he moved quickly between customers, shaking hands, recommending this cigar over that, telling a man with a broken Cartier lighter that he would have to take it back to Cartier.
"Cartier! They're crap aren't they, my dear fellow?" said the man, who wore his long coat open with a woollen scarf knotted at the neck - if a uniform exists in St James's, this is it. The scarf is usually red.
"Ah, but you should have bought a Davidoff," said Mr Sahakian, who, with his brownish suit and smooth domed head, looks rather like a neat cigar himself. His lapel had a badge promoting National Smoking Day.
How was trade? Trade was changing, said Mr Sahakian. Once the main market was men in their 50s, now it was younger people who bought fewer but pricier. Still, the sheer difficulty of smoking - or at least of smoking somewhere warm - presented very large obstacles. Inside Davidoff, for example, it is possible to smoke a cigar but not a cigarette or a pipe. The reason is a clause in the law that allows smokers to "sample" from an individual example.
Sealed pipe-tobacco tins don't allow this. The pipe-smoker is confined to the wild outdoors, choosing from a rapidly shrinking range of brands and often asking at the counter, like elderly madmen in pursuit of the dodo, for the long extinct. "Baby's Bottom, Three Nuns, Lloyd's Bondsman, even Balkan Sobranie ... all gone." I asked about a Dunhill brand called Early Morning Pipe, which had the most beautiful tin, light blue shot through with the yellow rays of a rising sun, a brilliant red cockerel in the foreground. "Finished. A gentleman came in this week and said he would take every tin we had. He took the last 25 tins."
St James's other tobaccanist, Fox's, still has quaint old statues of smoking Red Indians at the door but when I arrived a man (long Crombie coat, red scarf) was being chucked out for lighting a cigar (not sampled but bought) on the premises. There were still a few tins of Dunhill's 'The Royal Yacht' and I thought I should have one as a souvenir, until I discovered that the legend SMOKING KILLS, obscuring half the Edwardian design, was part of the tin and unpeelable. I asked about Christmas Mixture and Early Morning Pipe. "Gone, gone, gone, gone. Finished. All over," shouted the tobacconist as if he was bitterly remembering the destruction of a golden age, or tolling the end of one.
I like this bit of London, partly because the atmosphere of a golden age still clings to it. Eating welsh rarebit at Fortnum's, I heard someone say "frightfully". Up and down Jermyn Street there are all those shirt and suit shops - Hilditch & Key, Turnbull & Asser, Hawes & Curtis - whose names recall partnerships of young men with needles and thread, or maybe one had the money and the other the skill. In these shops, assistants call useable handkerchiefs "nose-blowers" as opposed to the decorative kind stuffed into jacket top pockets; and people still buy shooting sticks, port decanters, hip-flasks, and marine paintings by Montague Dawson.
At Bates, I asked about a hat, something in felt like a Borsalino. One was too rigid. Had they anything softer? Yes. But I thought the softer was too light. "That would be the case, sir. Softer means lighter." As always in shops such as this, you sense the looming danger of being found out as a parvenu by superior Jeeveses who, when they close the shop and take their manners off, must catch the bus home to a small-waged domesticity, which the next day, helping the rich out of their money, they somehow forget to resent.
None of this was unexpected. The surprise was that the streets were so English, that with four shopping days to Christmas there were so few Americans, Europeans, Indians and Japanese. An over-valued pound is blamed, just as online shopping, falling house prices and the predicted meaner City bonuses are blamed for a fall in sales in everything other than luxury foods. And this was visibly so: crowds in Fortnum's buying foie gras "gift sets" for £60 and, across Piccadilly, empty jewellery boutiques in the Burlington Arcade. A Christmas that sells fewer goods than the previous Christmas is a bad Christmas; which is why, in a cheerful Boxing Day walnut shell, industrial capitalism will eventually destroy itself, and us.
It was another cold bright day in a week of them. The weather is never a symptom of economic mood; who in London last week walked under the blue skies and denied anxiety? At Claridges in the evening, I saw another man in scarf and long coat leave the bar and take a lighter and old cigar from his pocket, saying to his friends, "I need my fix."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/dec/22/mainsection.ianjack |
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发表于 2012-6-14 23:00:19
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