Every now and again we all get that fundamental human desire for change. Be it your environment, your wife or girlfriend or even your taste in tobacco. I don't suffer from that particular affliction as on the whole I have almost everything I want or might need in life except for when it comes to 'cutty' pipes. You can never have enough. That being said there comes a point when it becomes necessary to make room to accommodate new additions to the flock. This weeks entry is all about the dilemma one faces on having to make room for a new addition to my brood by sacrificing one of my pipe children.
About a week ago I spied an absolutely wonderful pipe on my favorite hunting ground Oi Vay the online auction platform dedicated to the sale of shit. Its the modern ages answer to Reggie Perrin's chain of Grot Stores and if you didn't live through the 1970s Youtube will happily supply you with excepts from The Rise and Fall of Reggie Perrin. Anyway this pipe was fantastic. A perfect 'cutty' in an unmolested case, good clean threads, unbroken stem and the most amazing coloring since the last ox blood one I had purchased the other year. After some patient bidding and a ten day auction it was knocked down to me for Sixty Quid, thats about Eighty Five Dollars in US money with another Fifteen bucks thrown in for postage bringing my all in total to about One Hundred Dollars. Here are a couple of pictures to show you what a bargain I got and worthwhile addition to my collection.
This resulted in the dilemma of what had to go to make room. I decided to 'out' a meerschaum 'cutty' I picked up last year that was sadly without a case that probably dated to around 1910. It had one of those amberoid stems which either outlast your life span or break when you least expect it to happen. I pointed this out in my advert in My Pipe Club along with the fact that the threads, tenon and shank etc where as sound as the Empire Estate Building but it should be sent to Ric at Briarville at some point to have a new stem made and fitted. Here are a few pictures of the pipe before it was put up for adoption/sale.
Sure enough my good friend and fellow 'cutty' enthusiast David was in touch and before I had rolled out of bed the next morning I had a few dollars in my PayPal account and a pipe that needed mailing out by USPS Express Mail. So there you have it one pipe goes to a new home and another dusky one joins the collection. Later on this week I think I will take some pictures of my March/April 'cutty' rotation of thirty pipes so that you can get a good idea of how many pipes you need to be considered a serious old fart like me!
