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.
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