It was during second dessert — a euphemistic term for booze, chocolates, and conversation away from the dining hall — when the snuff box arrived. I had been listening to a philosopher convince me that certain metaphysical questions were interesting. While I declined a sniff of the stuff, he took a pinch between his finger and thumb, raised it to his nostril and inhaled. To my admiration he did this as if this were a perfectly normal and natural thing to do. Which it really wasn’t, at least as far as I was concerned. You can be attending an alumni dinner in the middle of Hillary term, passing around the dessert wines, and the whole business will still feel like fancy dress and pretend. Maybe the point at which you accept the snuff is the same point at which everything else seems completely natural as well.
Anyone following the ongoing controversy around the relative health benefits and dangers of vaping over cigarette smoking, should know that there have always been other means of ingesting tobacco and obtaining the nicotine hit. Just so that everyone is on the same page let me give the briefest of background. Snuff, which goes back as far as tobacco itself, is the product of pulverizing tobacco leaves down to a powder fine enough to inhale. It has had varying degrees of popularity, but never held the iconic status that the cigarette enjoyed through the 20th century. You can still buy it, and some use it.
The obscurity has led to many faux pas. I’ve been informed that guests, at past Oxford dinners, unfamiliar with the usual customs have laid out lines of the brown powder so as to hoover it up their snout like coke. Of course you can’t jump to too many conclusions; lines of coke have been rendered iconic by TV and cinema, and even individuals as sheltered as myself are aware of it.
The Wikipedia does reveal that a certain crevice in the hand, under a tendon leading to your thumb, is often referred to as the “anatomical snuffbox“. The French even have a word for it: the tabatière. So if you feel inclined to partake when the snuff box arrives, you can deposit a little pile there and show off a little vocabulary.
You can also go ahead and buy your own snuff box to impress/intimidate your house guests. Etsy offers an impressive range. They can get pretty pricey though. A snuff box bequeathed to Magdalen was considered valuable enough to be stolen a couple of decades ago. The controversy around the culprit apparently lingers on.
