July 30, 2010  Print Email | This is probably the worst cigarette in the world
Review There are other contenders, however
Posted by Mustapha Puff at 01:42 PM GMT on Feb 21, 2009 | AS THAT BIRD sang, I’ve been all round the world, I am a very old man now, and I’ve been smoking since I’ve been 16. So I’ve tasted them all.
I’ve smoked cigarettes in Morocco which, when lit, were so poorly manufactured that when you tapped the ash off the tip, the "tobacco" in the paper tube went flying too.
In China, I’ve seen vast shopping malls with hundreds of different varieties of fag, each packet having a label next to it, marked with their strength and their length, and with admiring shoppers carefully comparing their characteristics.
I’m old enough to have smoked Black Russians in pubs in Soho, to have tasted delicious oval cigarettes from Egypt and Turkey, to have half choked to death attempting packets of untipped Capstan Full Strength. I’ve even been so hard up that I’ve found myself on a European street picking up half smoked cigarettes that I’ve rolled up into viable tabs. And British Gold Flake were very nice items with a handsome packet that didn’t suggest you had to be in the Royal Navy and endure lashings of rum and sodomy too.
 But let me tell you something. Picking up dog-ends and turning them into tabs means a cigarette of some flavour. And they are incomparably better than the brand called Gold Flake Lights that you can buy in any Indian bazaar for Rs 80 ($1.61). Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that what I’m about to say in no way describes a real Indian Gold Flake. That’s a fine fag, a fag no-one should ever be ashamed to puff in the highest circles. Outside on the balcony, obviously, in these body-fascist days.
So what’s wrong with a Gold Flake Light? On the plus side, they stay lit when you strike a light. But that isn’t a plus. Because the cigarette itself is probably the most flavourless cigarette I’ve ever inhaled deeply. You get more kick out of breathing Delhi air than you do from a Gold Flake Light. And the experience with this fag just goes on and on. It doesn’t burn fast enough or deliver enough to make you feel you’re smoking anything. And when you see you still have 19 left in the packet, it’s enough to make you want to give up.
No. It’s enough to make you drag your weary body anywhere, anywhere, where you can buy a decent cigarette and stand outside with the proles feeling like you’re a pariah. The smokers outside will regard you as a pariah if you smoke this dreadful tab.
|
|
| |
|