First, eat the sweet corn kernels and scrape off as much of the soft outside of the husk as possible. Then take an inadequate, really blunt bread-knife and spend twenty sweaty minutes trying to saw off the first three inches of your cob. It will end up crooked and take some trimming to straighten it out, but with perseverance (given the uselessness of the goal), you will get there eventually.
Once you have accomplished the “saw through”, you must now dig out the core to form the pipe’s bowl. This time, take a sharp, but somewhat flimsy knife and when it inevitably keeps slipping, cut yourself quite badly – twice – before admitting to yourself that the effort of finding a sturdier implement really is worth it.
After applying Band-aids to your unnecessary wounds, find a small chisel that’s perfect for the job and have the core removed in less than a minute – as you should have in the first place if you weren’t being a lazy bollock-brain. Now take a corkscrew and drill a hole about half an inch above the base of the bowl, ready for the mouthpiece or “stem” to be fitted. Take care as you carry out this part of the operation, because splitting the bowl will result in you having to start all over again, which is really annoying. I would imagine. If you were actually too impatient and ham-fisted to actually do something that daft...
Penny dropping, realise that you haven’t given any thought whatever as to what you might use for a mouthpiece, or “stem”, and hunt around forlornly for a short length of thin bamboo, knowing full well, even as you instigate the search, there is nothing in the house even approximating such a thing. Go on looking anyway in the hope that some will magically appear – in the pot with the dead plant for instance – and only give up after searching the cutlery drawer three times. In desperation, replace non-existent bamboo stick with an empty ball point pen. One of those cheap crappy ones you get with charity begging letters will do. Don’t need them to write out any cheques, after all.
Anyway, wedge pen into the hole as hard as you can, because you won’t be able to glue it in place having been too childishly impatient to wait for the cob to dry out. Glue might be poisonous anyway and while as dopey as George Bush, you do retain some vestigial remnant of a survival instinct. For your first run, break up a couple of ciggies, any brand will do, and then pack the tobacco into the bowl of your new pipe. While sucking hard on the end of the pen, apply a flame to the top of the pipe until the tobacco is properly ignited. Take a puff and smile at your own cleverness.
Now strike a pose like Sherlock Holmes and take a good, long toke on your ingenious contraption. Feel searing, choking sensation in your lungs and cough desperately to clear your throat until you are gagging and almost sick. Fill several glasses of water and swallow them between breathless gasps and then have a second, even more violent coughing fit. Struggle to breathe, wipe the tears from your eyes and the drool from your mouth and cotton on to the fact that the pipe had become too hot, thereby melting the plastic pen and sending God knows what carcinogenic compounds deep into your delicate lung membranes.
Go and lay on the bed trying to inhale as shallowly as possible, without suffocating yourself, so as not to further rip your already slashed breathing tubes. Have it dawn on you that you should have learned your lesson after a pretty much identical thing happened to you as a teenager when, for the reason of having no cigarettes, you thought that it would be a good idea to smoke a thick wax drinking straw instead. But no. It really wasn't.
Anyway, that’s how I did it. Yes, I’m well aware that makes me practically as stupid as you, but not quite. After all, you’re the one wasting your time reading this drivel…
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