My Biography
A devotee of rhythm, ritual and refinement, I am a student of both engineering and etiquette – as much at home with thermodynamics as with tie knots. My humidor is a sanctuary of order, my lighter a secular relic. I regard the cigar not as a habit but as a herald of occasion.
What was the first cigar you ever smoked?
A Trinidad Reyes, handed to me with the solemnity of a diplomatic credential. I recall being both terrified and exalted – like reading Tacitus by candlelight for the first time.
Which is your desert-island cigar?
The Cohiba Siglo VI – ample, sonorous, and aristocratically indifferent to time. If one must suffer exile, let it be with a torch in hand and a breeze at one’s collar.
What is your greatest cigar-related memory?
Sharing a Behike 56 at dusk with a cousin in Spain – no phones, no agenda, just fire, silence, and the murmuring of old loyalties. The smoke rose like an unwritten testament.
What is your favourite cigar brand?
Trinidad
What is your favourite cigar accessory?
My S.T. Dupont Le Grand Cling Lighter
What is your favourite cigar shop?
Davidoff of London. Less a shop than a salon; a place where civility and cedarwood meet. Edward and Maximilian Foulkes preside not as merchants, but as custodians of the lost art of conversation.
What is your favourite lounge?
The Connaught Cigar Lounge
An evening there is time well burnt.
What is your favourite method of ignition?
Dupont
What is your favourite cut?
A single-blade guillotine – decisive, architectural, clean. How one begins often dictates the nature of the end.