Historically, the sight of rising smoke generally meant human activity or presence. To some extent it symbolised life. Nowadays it generally means the opposite. Smoking is deemed bad for us. It is bad for the environment too. Puffs from cigarettes have more or less been outlawed, replaced with clouds of electronically generated vapour.
A microwave oven probably produces more pleasure than these dreadful devices, which seem to have more in common with mobile telephones and their chargers than old-fashioned cigarettes.

What of cigars? Cigars are somewhat different. They are still an outlaw activity, but they have escaped the opprobrium of the pleasure censors, possibly because they are generally consumed behind closed doors. It is also a minority pursuit, so hardly worth the attention. But why smoke a cigar? More to the point, why do I?

I cannot explain why I started to become a cigar enthusiast, but I can perhaps explain why I haven’t stopped. In a nutshell, I see things more clearly through a haze of sensuous, swirling, cigar smoke.
I think it’s the breathing more than anything else. You have to really think about how and when you breathe. If you have ever tried meditation the parallels are not insignificant. You are fully present in the moment. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that smoking cigars is healthy, but they do help me to relax. I’ve never been a cigarette smoker, but it seems that cigarettes operate in the opposite direction. The expression ‘a quick cigarette’ is no accident. A quick cigar, in contrast, is practically impossible.

It’s the smell too. I actually think cigars smell best before you light them. Annoyingly, they smell ever better when someone else is smoking one. Twin a cigar with a good malt whisky, or glass of cognac, and the pairing is almost incomparable. Somehow the smoke combines with the glass to create useful distortions of reality.

Cigars are also pleasing to look at and to hold in the hand too. And a hand-rolled cigar is human-made and always slightly different, which could perhaps be viewed as a revolutionary act of defiance against the cult of efficiency and homogenised societies that too often confuse fast movement with enduring progress.

The packaging of cigars is generally from a bygone era, as are many of the shops that sell them. This too is an example of how cigars, and the paraphernalia that surrounds them, is a welcome pause, or deceleration, from a world that is not only rapidly accelerating towards I have no idea what, but obsessed with immediate gratification, newness and novelty.

Another reason for smoking, or continuing to do so, is the complexity that surrounds the cigar. Like wine, there is a lot to learn about cigars and a lot of cigars to choose from. It is a complex and ritualistic world. To begin with this can be intimidating. (All I came out with from the very first cigar shop I visited, Davidoff in London, was a box of long matches). But the cigar world is full of people keen to share not only their knowledge, but their enthusiasm too. This is perhaps another parallel with the wine world. Eventually I settled upon a handful of favourite cigars, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No.2, the H. Upman Magnum 46, the Romeo Y Julieta Short Churchill and the Bolivar No.2, but I continue to experiment.

There is also one further aspect, which, frankly, is not popular to discuss. This is the fact that cigar smoking is an almost entirely male activity. I have nothing against woman smoking cigars, in fact I rather like it, or perhaps I mean them. No, what I mean is that many of the rituals, meeting places and activities that were once wholly male have been invaded by women. Again, I have nothing against women, and nothing against places were both sexes might mingle happily, but just as women may need their own spaces so might men.

I will end by returning to my opening remark about thinking. How can it be possible for a cigar to make someone’s thinking clearer? The answer, in my experience, is that a cigar un-divides one’s attention. You start by cutting the cigar, carefully, and proceed to light it with expectant focus. The mind is already becoming unhurried. You take a puff (two puffs if the cigar is somewhat reluctant to fire up) and you see where the cigar takes you. You savour the flavour. You watch the smoke curl slowly upwards. Daily distractions momentarily disappear in the extended space between puffs. There is some solid science behind this, behind what appears to be nothing more than clouds of silent smoke.

When we are relaxed, when we are unhurried or seemingly wasting our time with empty moments, the mind starts to wander. As the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton once said: “The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.”

Given the right time and the right space the mind starts to seek patterns and connections in what we might ordinarily see as random inputs and experiences. You don’t always finish a cigar with an “ah ha” moment, but the very act of slowing down and sitting silently can do much of the groundwork to make insights and original thoughts rise to the surface. And, if none of this happens, you have at least had a relaxing moment to simply be.