It was a Russian friend who got me into it. Pipe-smoking, he told me, was his form of meditation, the thing that regularly sent him into a kind of trance. He’d got into it in the 1990s, when after communism fell and free trade flourished, a local pipe-master (or maker) started selling them on a rug laid out on the street. ‘A cigarette is a one-night stand,’ my friend told me. ‘Over quickly, mostly unmemorable, easily discarded. But a pipe is your friend for life.’

Robin Ashenden: Confessions of a Pipe-smoker