Swapping tobacco: My visit to a pipe club

Our local tobacconist, Main Street Cigar, has been hosting a pipe club for the past year and I finally decided to see what it was all about. I had meant to check it out last year, but on the night of the meeting, a blizzard shut down everything in the region. I should confess that I had some apprehensions about the thing to begin with, worried that the talk would be dominated by politics or sports or other non-tobacco related subjects. My worries were unfounded.
The pipe club turned out to be a small collection of men, young and not-as-young, who really, really like pipes, and cigars, and snuff, and well, all things tobacco. Everyone had brought their favorite pipes and scads of tobacco, much of it unwanted, which we all traded back and forth. I say traded, but what we did was give it away to each other. One attendee summed it up as follows: "If I don't like it, I'm not worried about getting my money back, I just want somebody to enjoy it." These were nice people, and they knew their stuff too. It was a lot of fun to be with a group of people who had done their homework.
The meeting was pleasantly informal, the moderator opened up a can of McClelland Christmas Cheer 2004 pipe tobacco, a very tasty Virginia flake. We all commenced to smoking, while enjoying tobacco talk and watching a movie, which, naturally, featured the inhabitants of 221b Baker Street. Then, there was a raffle of a Savinelli pipe, which, in the interests of full disclosure, I won, and then we closed the meeting until next month. A pleasant time was had by all. Recommended.

Illustration: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson by Sidney Paget, 1893.