A suburban shop front will never be a gentlemen's club, and a cigar bar will never be an elite aristocratic drawing room. It will just be another restaurant space in a shopping mall, and about as exclusive as a peak-hour traffic jam. But I find them smelly and pretentious and that's why I miss old Dr Zuma because she at least would have tried to do something about them. In Europe and the United States cigar manufacturers are not obliged to carry those government health warnings about how likely you are to die if you smoke tobacco. It is absurd that it should be like this.
Cigars are, if anything, stronger than cigarettes.
Those same reports that led to health warnings on cigarette packaging show that a cigar is twice as bad for you than a cigarette ever was. Yet somehow they have escaped the net. They have been given the glamour treatment in posters and, inexplicably, in a series of extremely luxurious and expensive magazines, all of them featuring cover pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian Oak, with a roll of Havana weed in his mouth. Surely this is a subject with finite journalistic potential. You might just as well have The Baked Beans Magazine, The Broccoli Journal or the Cabbage Review.