For a while now I have been getting fags for Herself in the new “plain” packs.

The other day though I got my first example of the pipe tobacco version.

For quite a while now they have been pushing their medical porn at me with their often humorous images and their blatantly false or totally misleading messages.

Okay, in this example we have a photograph of a bloke.  Is he contemplating the meaning of life?  Has he got an itch in his ear?  I think he possibly has toothache.  They claim that smoke contains 70 substances etcetera which is possibly true, but they fail to mention that the actual quantities of those substances are so incredibly small that it takes a sophisticated laboratory to even detect them.

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So now we move on to the brave new world that is going to dissuade me from ever smoking again.

Wow!  Same old messages and a different image [but from the old stock].  So what exactly is the change that is to radically change a lifetime’s enjoyment and destroy said enjoyment for ever?

Well, the colour is different.  I quite like the new colour: it has an earthy feel to it.  It reminds me of the mountains as it has a quality of peat bogs and tree bark.  The images as I have said are the same, which is a bit disappointing, but just moved around a bit, and the text is the same old drivel that I never bother reading.

So what is it that is to be so repellent?

It’s the bird!  The condor bird is missing from the pack,  Is it that avian image which has been the underlying cause of my smoking all along?

There is another difference that isn’t apparent in the photographs above, and that is the texture of the pack.  The old one was glossy and has a very plastic feel to it, whereas the new pack has a pleasant velvety texture as it it were made of a very fine silk.

I like that texture.

I think I’ll carry on with the smoking after all.