Fancy a fag?

Have a:
Passing Cloud, expensive oval cigarettes in a pink packet, suitable for lounge lizards, femmes fatales and uphill gardeners.
Three Castles, a green packet and definitely macho. Related to the pipe tobacco, described as "the tobacco with the curious cut". Curious, and reassuringly expensive.
Players, logo a bearded sailor, suitable for those of us who were about to circumnavigate the world. In two versions: Mild and Full Strength.
Capstan, blue packet; or, if you wanted "full strength", brown: larynx-destroyers.
Balkan Sobranie, posh fags in a top opening box, various colours: needing a cigarette holder to give you that Noel Coward image. And look a prat.
Senior Service, another naval theme, virgin white packet, became my preferred puff.
Craven A: that rarity, a filter tipped ciggy, suitable for women and wimps. Craven A were sometimes sold in tins (until the war effort required every scrap of metal to be collected and dropped on Adolf Hitler). A Craven A tin, with its hinged lid, was a great prize: you could keep THINGS in it!
And then there were the poor man's drags:
Woodbines, green packet with a woodbine curled round the name (you could buy them singly).
de Reske Minors, specialist taste among the discerning poor.
Player's Weights, thin, cheap and liable to fall to pieces between your lips. Also available singly.
And the new brands designed to seduce us away from our regular weed:
Dunhill, with the white dot on brown - I think they just wanted us to buy their lighters.
Strand, might have been a success till they came up with the advertising slogan "You are never alone with a Strand". Being alone and lonely was already part of our adolescent angst, we didn't need a cigarette to underline our isolation. It bombed.

Be honest, you have no idea what I am talking about. But I can assure you that when I was a beardless youth, there was a tobacco culture as elaborate as any adolescent ritual today. By their fags shall ye know them. We not only smoked them, we collected the packets, as well as matchboxes, and became phillumenists. My prize fag packet was a Turf, a dreadful weed produced, it was rumoured, from camel dung during the war and only redeemed by having "fag cards" in each packet, small pics of footballers, cricketers, birds, flowers, national flags and so on - all of which fetch serious prices at Collectors Swapmeets these days.

My life was determined by Uncle Ernie. He owned the village newsagent and tobacconist's shop. I delivered papers for him. I also worked in the shop on weekends, specially Saturday evening when the all the men of the village congregated to buy a copy of the Pink'un, giving the sporting results and confirming that this was yet another Saturday when they had won nothing on the geegees or the pools. Uncle Ernie's niece, Alicia, also worked in the shop, and it was natural that I should fall in love with her, despite the siren attractions of a plump and frustrated lady called Hilda whose delight was to rub her enormous bum against me whenever she passed me. Remember those plump bottomed fisherwomen on their bikes in Fellini's "Amarcord" that provided a week's fantasies for the boys of the town? That was my Hilda. With contact. Staying with Amarcord, the tabacchaia finally offers our adolescent hero an "Esportazione", having nearly suffocated him mammarily. On my first year in Italy, I tried and failed Esportazioni. Thankfully I found a black market source of Lucky Strike. A subsequent sojourn working in Paris and smoking Gitanes was just what I needed to give up smoking altogether, thank god.
But I still have an enormous nostalgia for the days when cigarette-smoking was innocent and an art form and the packets were works of art. Look at a Passing Cloud packet - or even a Woodbine packet - and you will see what I mean.