Back away from the pipe

It must be almost two years ago that my girlfriend and I went to see the brilliant comic Stewart Lee in the Town Hall here in Galway and this week a part of his set came flooding back to me. The part in question was about a Bulmer’s Pear advertisement that was running in Britain at the time. I’m not going to try and recreate Lee’s dry repetitive monotonic style in print, youtube doesn't even do him justice, he is not a comedien for soundbites. The content of the joke is not what matters here rather the overarching message within it. In this instance it pertained to the fact that the advert in question used the song “Galway Girl”. This song meant a lot to Lee, the Steve Earle original I'll assume and not the version by cowboy hat sporting buffoon from the midlands who covered it recently, as it evoked memories of meeting his wife. A Galway girl funnily enough. It was the misappropriation of the song by advertisers that had aggrieved Lee so much. Why, I hear you ask, did this memory come back to me? Well as I sat in the library staring out the window contemplating the common features of agrarian secret societies and food rioters in late 18^th and early 19^th century Ireland, I happened to notice three young men, in the range of 19 to 22 (the older I get the tougher it is to put an age on anyone else), sitting on the ledge by the Concourse smoking pipes. This was followed the next day by two young girls of about the same age engaged in the same activity. “The hipsters have taken to the pipe!” I thought in my horror.

I guess at this juncture I should make it clear that the drug of choice in these instances was tabacco but never the less I was agast.You see pipes and pipe smoking have a special place in my heart. Neither of my parents smoked tobacco in any form but I did have an uncle Michael, my father’s brother in law, so smoked a pipe. He was a 6ft 4” gentle giant of a man with hands the size of Christmas hams, who, on spotting an unattended niece or nephew would pick them up spin them around several times and return them to earth dizzy and nauseated. I spent a few Saturday afternoons waiting in his living room for my father to finish work enveloped in the smell of his pipe tobacco and staring at his collection of pipes above the fire. Out of reach and even more desirable for it. He indulged my curiosity once and needless to say that was my last experience of smoking a pipe. On the other side of my family my mother also had a brother in law who smoked a pipe called Michael. I considered entering into an exhaustive research project to find out if there was any correlation between the name Michael and the instances of pipe smoking before thinking the final semester of  your degree was perhaps not the right time. A summer project perhaps. Now I would only ever see this Michael at Christmas due to the fact that he lived in Dublin, and every Christmas without fail he would walk the mile or so up the road from my cousin’s house to visit my father and discuss greyhounds, GAA and other such important matters. Michael unfortunately succumbed to cancer last year and the world is a less gentle place for his absence.

So you see pipes have a special place in my heart and to see them misappropriated by these hipsters breaks my heart a little. Now, I don't want to get bogged down in maudlin nostalgia for lost uncles, pipe smoking probably did little to keep the the grim reaper at arms lenght. I guess for me, there is a certain amount of gravitais required to smoke a pipe and this is a quality rarely found in those in their twenties. I don’t have a problem with hipsters either, in fact I find them quiet amusing. I find their ability to elevate and cannibalize aesthetics into a way of life, endlessly entertaining. My own housemate is a self confessed hipster. Only a couple of weeks ago she returned home in what she half jokingly referred to as a “pikey hipster” hat. She has since then asked if I’d like to buy a gate and to go halves on an internet business selling retro Fisher Price tape decks as jewellery. I have no problem with them wearing skinny jeans, glasses that aren’t prescription or having a complete irony bypass. Go ahead knock yourself out with those particular affectations but please back away from the pipe.