It's quiet here on the second floor, today. Well, relatively quiet - Pam is still running around trying to sort out both update stuff and the shipments of pipes which continue to come in as ever, but without Sykes walking up and down the hall a dozen times a day for coffee, Ted constantly on the phone with customers, or Adam... being Adam, the Smokingpipes offices are as about as tranquil as they ever get. Too tranquil, perhaps - I am not by any means unaware of the fact that, at present, Chuck and I are the only males remaining in the office, and that we are outnumbered two-to-one by the fairer sex. This isn't a problem for Chuck, of course, but then Chuck is not a shameless cad, as I am, and has not repeatedly, and quite deliberately, ruffled the feathers of certain other co-workers, as I have most certainly insisted on doing despite the self-evident inevitability that this will come back to bite me.

Just last week, in fact, I walked down to the space shared by Pam, Susan, and, of late, Cassidy, to ask if any of them had a safety pin. Susan inquired as to why I needed one, and no sooner had I answered that I had lost a button on the cuff of my jacket than she asked me to take it off and hand it to her. Having done so, she immediately produced a sewing kit and proceeded to re-attach the button for me. Well, what else to make of this, you are no doubt thinking, than that Susan has the patience of a saint? True enough, saints are certainly patient enough - but so too is a serpent waiting to strike. After having spent several days teasing her over her recent acquisition of a notably over-fed pony, such benevolence was indeed disquieting.

I am not a religious man in the traditional sense, understand - I don't have much faith in the benevolent intervention of saints; but I do most certainly believe in the patience of an ambush predator laying in wait. As boys, my friends and I were all rather fond of teasing and attempting to capture venomous snakes, snapping turtles, and the like, you see... which now that I think of it, probably explains a great deal about how it has all come to this. Regardless, what I am getting to is this: Adam, Ted, Sykes - if you return from the office and I've vanished from the face of the earth, and the girls are all saying they haven't the faintest idea as to where I could be... check the ground around the old oak tree out back, and, if it isn't too much to ask, avenge me.

On what is certainly a less ominous note, today we have quite an update in store for you all: quality briars from Sebastien Beo, Savinelli, Peterson, Vauen, and Chacom; hand-made artisanal pieces by Dunhill, Radice, and Castello; two-dozen estates pipes, split evenly between English and Italian; finally, new cigar offerings from Montecristo, Augusto Reyes, and Don Diego.

Eric Squires: Copywriter