A fascinating newcomer on the British high street is the vape shop. These were perfectly described by my friend Paul Craven as ‘like a cross between an Apple Store and an Elizabethan apoth-ecary’.
In the splendid All About da Vape in Deal, there is a glass cabinet full of new, hi-tech ‘mods’, ‘tanks’ and ‘coils’, while on rows of shelves behind the counter is a Cambrian explosion of coloured bottles containing e-liquid in many strengths and flavours, hipsterishly labelled Suicide Bunny, Jimmy the Juice Man or Miss Pennyworth’s Elixirs; I recently bought a bottle of something called Unicorn Puke.
Yet to anyone over 40 it all seems strangely familiar in a Proustian kind of way (and yes, a company called Bordo2 makes a flavoured Madeleine de Proust e-liquid — £12.99 for 20ml). The memories the shop brought back were of what a good tobacconist was like 30 years ago, when chaps still smoked pipes.
In a way, the whole vaping market has mutated in a way no one could have foreseen: rather than simply replacing cigarette smoking (sales of ‘cig-alike’ devices have peaked) the market has spontaneously reinvented pipe-smoking in electronic form.
Unlike cigarette-smoking, where a few huge brands dominated, the pipe-tobacco market was hugely fragmented (unless you smoked Clan or St Bruno, which nobody of any discernment did). Cigarette smokers had a repertoire of brands they would smoke in extremis, but pipe men were generally fiercely loyal to very few — which is what made old tobacconists’ shelves so magically varied. British pipe-smokers were also naturally insular because, once you left Blighty, all foreign pipe tobacco was unimaginably disgusting. The commonest French brand (St Claude, I think) was positively sulphurous.
All the old pipe-smoker behaviours are re-emerging.
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