Simon sniffs: a pioneering perfume protégé is doused down under in a fragrant Fitzroy foray

Fraser Island by David Stanley (Nanaimo, Canada) via Wikimedia Commons 

It's been over a month since my last post, though there has been the Christmas runaround to contend with, plus it took me several weeks at least to come up with that title. The wags amongst you might say I should have taken longer. 

Regular readers may remember my friend Simon, whose growing interest in niche fragrance I have been privileged to help fuel: his perfume collection is featured on the blog - kept in the tiny fridge on his narrow boat, despite space being at an absolute premium! - and I have also covered his various brand epiphanies, namely those of the unexpectedly exclamatory Fragrance Republic, Creed, and the unexpectedly capitalised BEX London. He has now been interested in perfume long enough to be upset by the discontinuation of favourite scents - nay, whole brands - in the case of FR!. (That may well be its own exclamation mark.)

In late November Simon travelled to Australia to spend time with his daughter, who had been working on a nine month contract out there. During his trip, covering Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, The Blue Mountains and The Gold Coast, he sent me a running photo reportage, which included the amusing leitmotiv of "Australians telling it like it is". (All the following photos are by him.)

None of this "tall" or "grande" nonsense...and be careful what you do with the cup afterwards!

Scissors - it needed saying, I guess, as there is of course the alternative of clippers.

Simon's favourite spot of his whole itinerary was the upmarket Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. He is a bit of a "cafe lizard" and coffee aficionado, and I sense he was well served there in its sybaritic watering holes. 

I don't care for coffee myself, but could totally see the appeal of the squishy sofas, vibrant art works, and architectural pot plants placed at strategic intervals. Those are just the sort of comfy cafés where "doing a bit on work on your laptop" could all too easily segue into full time squatting.

The gorgeous photos of Fitzroy kept coming...

And it's not just hats the Aussies hang corks on!

One morning, Simon popped into a perfumery in Fitzroy called Lore, on Brunswick Street. It makes me happy that someone I nudged down the rabbit hole should choose to visit a perfume shop 17,000 km away with no prompting from me - I was actually asleep at the time. ;) For Simon is a fully fledged fumehead, sniffing stuff I have never heard of, such as the Australian brand, Goldfield & Banks. Not only that, but he made a purchase of a scent from the line, Wood Infusion. 

Notes: Australian Exotic Woods, Sweet Orange, Orris Italy, Agarwood, Lavender Australia, Patchouli Indonesia, Musk, Amber

(Origin Woods: Fraser Island - Queensland)

The creative director for Goldfield & Banks is Dimitri Weber, and the perfumer is German/Iranian nose, Hamid Merati-Kashani, whose other credits include several perfumes for Amouage, Marly, and Piguet. 

Helping him home in on a perfume he would love, Simon was under the expert guidance of Clea, one of the store's sales assistants, who mentioned that she knew and admired Dimitri Weber. She explained his artistic vision and how his fragrances reflect the region in terms of their choice of ingredients and/or general vibe. Simon even showed Clea my blog(!), a promotional manoeuvre that was entirely spontaneous on his part, I swear.

I see that the Lore Perfumery website also "tells it like it is", with the headline: "We Love Perfume", and the injunction to "Stalk Us". There's a Q & A with Clea on there in which she mentions that her favourite scent - if she absolutely had to pick one, which we all know is a deeply disturbing concept - is Nasomatto's Blamage, "Not only for the fragrance, but what it stands for." Now that intriguing statement had me immediately diving into Google to find out what she meant, and the result is very interesting - sounds like the sort of stunt Geza Schoen would pull! This quote is from Sydney fashion retailer, Sorrythanksiloveyou:

The creator wants us to know: “From our mistakes, can come something beautiful”. Legend has it that Gualtieri blindfolded himself and picked several ingredients at random, determined to create something from the chaos. The result is Blamage (the German word for ‘Disgrace’), a metallic, woody, and floral affair. 

Now though I had not heard of Goldfield & Banks, I immediately thought of someone who would have, namely Portia, the doyenne of antipodean perfume writing. He is doubtless familiar with Lore Perfumery, along with readers of his late great blog, Australian Perfume Junkies. And sure enough, I found a review of Wood Infusion and other scents he owns from the line over on Perfume Posse, and told Simon that he was in distinguished company with his choice.

And of course, if he is a perfumista worth his salt, Simon will want to go back to Australia one day and check out the inspiration for Wood Infusion, Fraser Island (or K'gari, the traditional name by which it is now known again)...

The end of a second summer...

NB I do not wish to suggest by my use of the word "doused" in the title that my friend was in any sense spritzed to excess during his visit - he may have been sampling things on blotters, or trying a discreet spray on a single wrist, or sniffing nozzles of testers, I don't know. I deployed the word purely - and shamelessly - for its alliterative value. For an instance of my being literally doused in perfume in a shop in Paris, see here.

PS There wasn't an obvious place to insert this earlier, but my mother is from Australia! She was born in a suburb of Perth, but also lived in Sydney and Broome, finally leaving for England in 1928, at the age of eight. I have been myself, in 1993, and would love to go back one day, having long since forgotten about the pesky flies. ;)

Fleetingly floofy: Color Wow Dream Cocktail Carb-Infused Leave-in Treatment review

It's been a long time since I last wrote about a hair care product on Bonkers, but my recent quest to find something to give my fine, limp hair a bit of a lift in the crown may be of interest to any other seekers of volume, oomph, or anything vaguely resembling an artfully tousled look.

In recent years my hair had been steadily growing, and I rather liked it long. However, lately the ends had been getting wayward and starting to point in random directions, while the sides were flat to my head, pulling my face down with them, and making me look a bit like a downtrodden housemaid. An opportunistic hairdresser in Bognor Regis decided to cut these ends off, while my regular hairdresser back home decided I'd look better with my hair even shorter, in a chin length bob. He said I needed to go this short in order to grow my hair back again in a better way. It was all rather over my head, despite being all around it, hehe, but there was much mention of layers being either too long or too short, my fringe being in fact two fringes laid on top of each other - both of them also wayward, kinky, and overly thinned - and the need to be patient.

So I now have a shortish bob that still lies flat to my head and is fuller at the bottom, moreover it sits away from my head in a sort of triangle shape rather than the bouffant ball of my imaginings. Maybe I would have needed to go shorter still to achieve that look, but I wasn't daring enough to ask. Do I mean "triangle" in fact or "trapezium", bearing in mind that the top of my head is not quite as pointy as the apex of a triangle? But you get the picture. I think I still look like a downtrodden housemaid, just a shorter version - though occasionally I think I might pass for a minor character in Upstairs Downstairs or a Molly Keane novel. What I do have now is definitely a style, but I'm not convinced it does me any favours, and I am forever tucking bits of hair behind my ears in a bid to reduce the width of the base of the triangle. I was tempted for a moment there to say "hypotenuse", but the top of my head isn't a right angle after all. ;) 

This dissatisfaction in turn prompted me to pay more attention to the many hair and beauty ads and reels that appear in my Facebook timeline...there are an awful lot to do with extreme weight loss, face lifts, miraculous shaper pants, inspiring life advice from female celebrities who are aging gracefully, wigs, and other hair transformations in salons filmed in real time and partly speeded up - these are invariably in Spanish or Italian for some reason. I do also get more off the wall ads, such as ones for hydrating jelly sweets for dementia sufferers - Facebook may know something about my future that I would prefer to disregard, but I did buy some regular Midget Gems the other day as a precaution.

Source: Color Wow's YouTube channel

Then I spied a video from the US company Color Wow - obviously I feel the need right off the bat to explain the lack of a "u" - for its Dream Cocktail product, a gel spray which you squirt onto your hair before styling - it is heat activated, and needs a jolly good blow dry to work. It also has a bit of inherent heat protection as an added bonus. This isn't the exact same video as I saw on Facebook, but it features the same woman, who goes from flat to mega flouncy in a couple of minutes. Her projectile fringe looks like a Donald Trump combover on steroids, and I thought: "I could do with some of that!"I have since heard that Dream Cocktail is endorsed by Chris Appleton, celebrity stylist to the Kardashians, but I promise you that wouldn't have influenced me either way had I known that nugget at the outset. ;)

I tell myself again and again to be wary of Facebook ads, ever since I bought some Fairisle patterned Nordic socks that were pictured against a rugged backdrop of fjord-forward scenery, giving me the impression that they were hand knit by pleasantly gnarled old ladies in wooden cabins lit by oil lamps 24/7 owing to the lack of natural light at that latitude. What actually came were nasty acrylic numbers made in China, with a return shipping address of a warehouse in former East Germany.

Hoping firmly that I wasn't making a similar mistake, and that I would receive a tin of crazy foam or squirty cream or at worst perhaps, WD40, I placed an order, which arrived the next day. I couldn't wait to try it out. I am not a very competent blow dryer, I should perhaps say, though I do know the principle of lifting sections of hair and blowing the roots across the top of the head as the woman is doing in the video.

Finished result - floofy housemaid?

To be fair, I did achieve a lot of extra volume, including some around the crown of the head, though the effect was more generally dispersed. And the gel product, which stays in the hair as its name suggests, was not in the least sticky or greasy, like many things I have tried before - so that is a big plus. I do still use craft clay to style my hair when dry, and the quantity needs careful gauging to avoid the hair feeling claggy with sticky stuff.

However, sadly the floofy look was very shortlived, and within minutes of walking around my hair was lying flatter to my head again. I think it was still thicker - and with cumulative use, I am hoping that it might even build more volume that way - but there is no way that the outlandish volume the woman is sporting in this video was my experience, even briefly. Perhaps she managed to keep it in place with lashings of hair spray, which is a product category I have never engaged with.

So in summary, I would say that Dream Cocktail feels nourishing, and did "pump up the volume", but only temporarily. Is it "extra hair in a bottle", as some reviewers have claimed? Well, kind of, though my jury is still out on the matter. As I say, I do quietly harbour the hope that I might gain lasting extra body with repeated use. Also, at £18 odd on Amazon it wasn't cheap, but for my length of hair I only needed a couple of pumps, so I imagine it would last ages.

If you have fine hair, have you found a holy grail volumising spray? I'd be curious to know what may still be out there that works!

Might look better when my fringe has grown

Editor's note: I realise I haven't included any "before" photos, either of the woman in the video or me. The woman appears at the start with wet hair, which doesn't tell you anything, and I have yet to capture my hair looking quite as flat and triangular as it did at the start...so maybe the product is hanging around and helping!

"Discover Intense": Thoughts on a £6 discovery set from M & S, as Bonkers about Perfume turns 15!

Source: weddingfactorydirect.com

If you had told me back in October 2009 that I would still be writing blog posts 15 years on, perfume-themed or otherwise, I would not have believed you. I am telling myself this fact now, and I don't even believe me. But there it is...769 posts to date, all by yours truly - how long they collectively took I really don't want to imagine! Then I have had 12.6k comments (Google stats are approximate ;)), and a tally of page views that is no longer meaningful ever since I was overrun by bots somewhere around the three million mark.

As I have reported on previous anniversaries, I am now in the quiet plateau phase of this hobby, largely tuning out to new releases unless they are plonked in my hand by an enthusiastic friend. I am also sufficiently becalmed in the backwaters of the blogosphere for most perfume houses not to include me in their sampling campaigns - I am typically just sent hi-res pictures now, and some of their emails even go straight into spam(!), so even Gmail must sense my growing dissociation from the industry. But that is okay, because I am not actively interested in new things if I am honest, with a few notable exceptions such as the latest addition to the Papillon stable, for example. If you gave me a free trip to those fragrance fairs in Florence and Milan I wouldn't take you up on it (far too hectic and overstimulating!), and these days I walk straight through the Duty Free at airports and the departure lounge of Eurostar. I am afraid the tidal wave of nouveau niche scent launches has overwhelmed my brain and dulled my olfactory palate. 

There is also the fact that in the run up to pension age I am trying to be cautious with my spending generally, and most of my retail urges can be assuaged by a used book from Amazon or a bargain from a local charity shop. My last big perfume extravagance was buying a couple of second hand bottles (one of a discontinued scent) from a fellow blogger, but the prices of today's niche scents are so out of reach that to fall in love with one would only lead to the frustration of an unsated lemming, a parlous state best avoided in the first place.

Another understandable consequence of this becalming may be the dwindling number of comments on my posts compared with the heyday of the blog some ten years ago, or even last year: I am not really on the "comments circuit", though I note that there still is one. I can think of several "water cooler" blogs where people congregate, most of whom I still don't know after all these years, I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was always on the sidelines of "the scene"? Then some readers may well have migrated to vlogs instead, and I understand the appeal of that more visual medium, having recently watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials on how to cook a whole chicken in an air fryer. ;) So in short I have changed, and the world has changed, but I still love perfume. I wear it most days, and I continue to help friends find new fragrances to love from my stash. I also recently helped someone track down a cheapish bottle of Mitsouko, and someone else one of Carnal Flower, though a "cheapish" bottle of that proved to be a challenging quest!

Which brings me round to the definitely very cheap discovery set from M & S called "Discover Intense", attractively packaged in a multi-coloured wallet? tray? foldy out cardboard box? coffret? I am not sure what the correct term is. One thing it definitely isn't is an Intense set of anything, haha - all the perfumes within are pleasant and inoffensive and somewhat fleeting (unsurprisingly for an eau de toilette), but for £6 you are not going to quibble. That's 50p per ml, when I am used to paying ten times that for a 1ml niche vial on one of those sampling sites. This M & S sextet doesn't warrant reviewing as such, as they pretty much smell as billed, in a simple, faintly watery, "sub-designer scent" kind of a way. The full list is as follows (the ampersand gets a bit of a workout as you can see, but they are by M & S after all!):

• Mandarin & Ylang Ylang
• Nectar & Passionfruit
• Orange Blossom & Amber
• Red Berries & Rose
• Gardenia & Vanilla
• Sea Salt & Neroli

I have heard Sea Salt & Neroli compared to Jo Malone's Wood Sage & Sea Salt, and Orange Blossom & Amber to Coco Mademoiselle, but I can't say I see the resemblance myself, or only conceptually in the case of the former perhaps, given that sea salt is an unusual note in perfume - it has a long way to go to rival salted caramel in the confectionery aisle, say. 

I took this little coffret (there, I am pinning my colours to the packaging mast ;)) to France last month, and tried a different perfume every day, cycling back every so often to Mandarin & Ylang Ylang (because I love Ylang Ylang, not that it is very intense here, of course), and Sea Salt & Neroli, (because I wanted to test the Jo Malone dupe claim). It makes a most convenient travel set and if any catch your fancy, a bottle costs the princely sum of £12.50 for 100ml...!

And this isn't even the only six quid discovery set M & S has to offer, though the perfumes in the other one looked even more straightforward, in slightly plainer packaging. I seem to recall at least one set for men too. It beats me how they can offer something so inexpensive, and even if the quality is not comparable to niche scents, I would certainly be seen dead in them. Or maybe not dead, as I would pick my "exit scent" with a little more consideration.

Chanel Les Exclusifs Bois des Iles & House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved / Immortal Mine II: "thunkophobia" aka olfactory range anxiety

I have nearly finished reading a book by Hannah Jane Parkinson called "The Joy of Small Things", a collection of her columns of the same name for The Guardian, which were inspired in turn by J B Priestley's "Delight" - a book with which I am not familiar, despite having played the odious Ernest Beevers in Time and the Conways. I remember delivering the line: "You've done a lot of silly things in your time, Mrs Conway, but I think you'll find that's the damn silliest!", whereupon Mrs C would slap my face and a great cloud of talcum powder would whoosh up into the air.

But I digress...

"The Joy of Small Things" is similar in format to the late, great Michael Mosley's compendium of health tips, "Just One Thing", except that instead of being a collection of interventions you could do to improve your well-being, "The Joy of Small Things" features a bunch of things the author already finds conducive to her well-being, such as "The perfect dressing gown", "Cheating a hangover", "Closing browser tabs" and "Recovering from a cold". No selection does justice to the 100 or so titles of small sources of joy she covers. I would urge you all to get yourselves a copy, but maybe hold off for a few months in case I buy you it for Christmas. ;)

It occurred to me that "The joy of thunking a decant or sample" could very well have featured in the book, had Hannah Jane Parkinson been a perfumista. I have found one reference to fragrance in the book so far, but only about the relative cost of cedar and sandalwood oil in the context of an episode of The Apprentice. ;) Re thunking, it's not even about the decisive noise of the glass hitting the table as you set it down, empty at last. It is more the satisfaction of frankly finishing ANY receptacle of perfume you own, however small. There's a glaring paradox in my being a person who hates waste, yet who has managed to acquire a sprawling collection of perfume that will greatly outlast my remaining time on earth.

Source: House of Cherry Bomb

So given my scent surfeit, you might think it strange that I could ever get anxious about running out of a particular perfume. And by "olfactory range anxiety" I don't mean a situation where you apply a fragrance at King's Cross and it wears off before you get to Peterborough, but simply the sense of using something up. I wore Bois des Iles and House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved this week, and found myself getting really quite twitchy about the dwindling level of my decant of each. So much so that I ordered 2ml of Bois des Iles from a guy on the Fragrance Sale / Swap / Split site on Facebook, which arrived today. I realised my original sprayer (pictured at the top of the post) actually has more left in it than I remembered - 3ml maybe? - but still the fear took hold...

Minor reinforcements 

It will be much harder to source some more Immortal Beloved, because this indie perfume house doesn't seem to have a normal website anymore where you can buy stuff, plus it is based in Brooklyn, and I  know to my cost that sending a perfume shipment across the pond is a perilous enterprise, though I might be able to find a US-based "scent mule". The name of the fragrance also seems to have changed since I last looked, to Immortal Mine II. I have messaged HOCB via their Instagram page, but have not heard back. If anyone reading this happens to live in New York, and has news of the brand, do let me know. So for the moment I have just topped up the Chanel by £4.50's worth. Maybe I will have to accept that when Immortal Beloved is gone, it's gone, like Texan and Marabou Delite bars, and Walkers Gently Infused Lime with Thai Spices crisps. And no, their Lime & Coriander Chutney-flavoured poppadoms are not acceptable substitutes. 

I spotted an actual Texan bar on eBay for £99! It is listed as "new", but I'm not sure how it would taste after 40 years...?!

Sticky back plastic: my (historic) run in with seborrheic dermatitis, and testing perfumes in unusual places

Long term readers (or any Instagram followers) may recall that I am prone to several kinds of dermatitis: mainly the allergic and irritant contact variety, about which I have done a few posts, most notably - and graphically! - this one.

I did also have a six month spell of seborrheic dermatitis, which came out of nowhere after the first Covid booster vaccine - I will of course never know if the two things are connected. This consisted of red blotches randomly dotted around my face, and it also resembled dandruff due to the addition of flaky white bits, particularly in my eyebrows and hairline. It was pretty unsightly, and no sooner had some patches subsided than new ones sprung up in different spots, a bit like the Visual Field Test in the optician's, where you have to track a pinprick of white light darting around the screen - or a vintage bagatelle-style fruit machine, if anyone remembers those. ;) 

Anyway, I did a lot of research about possible cures, and eventually lit upon a blog post by a guy who had been suffering from seborrheic dermatitis for many years, trying over 30 remedies to no avail. One of the few supplements that had worked for him was L-glutamine, and since this was the only one of the several things he mentioned that I could readily access, I gave it a go, and sure enough, within a month or so I was completely free of the blotches, and they have never returned. I did find that L-glutamine made me very wakeful at night though, so was glad to come off it, being a scrappy sleeper at the best of times.

Now I can't say for sure either that the L-glutamine "cured" my skin issue - it may have been a placebo effect, as the blogger was so convinced of its efficacy, and these complaints do sometimes completely resolve or come and go of their own accord, which was my doctor's theory. He did still refer me for some allergy patch testing, something I had already undergone seven years previously for the other types of dermatitis I have; these had thrown up that old chestnut nickel, plus benzoyl peroxide (typically found in acne medications to which I have had bad reactions in the past) and more suprisingly, Vitamin E, especially in its synthetic form (tocopherol acetate).

The original test date came through when I was laid up with trapped nerves in my neck in 2022, so it was in fact only last month that my appointment was reinstated. And so on a Tuesday in late August I headed up to a clinic in Basford, near Stoke-on-Trent. The area is a notorious traffic black spot, and I had to run the gauntlet of multiple warning signs saying "Road Work's" and "Delay's" with rogue apostrophes, which I am amazed haven't caused pile ups involving shocked and distracted grammar nerds.

Source: Stoke on Trent Live

At the clinic it took no time at all to stick a big clear plastic sheet on my upper back, filled with lint pockets that had been impregnated with mostly chemical allergens. I wasn't told what any of them were, but was simply urged not to get my back wet until Saturday(!). After 48 hours the patches could come off, as any reaction would have taken place by then, but I still had to keep my back dry till my return visit. Which sounds fairly simple, but turned out to be tricky in practice on several counts. Firstly, the plastic sheet tugged constantly at my skin, pulling it in different directions, like an Elastoplast you have initially put on too tightly. In this case though, I was not able to remove and re-stick the sheet down in another position, so I had to put up with the itchy, scratchy, pulling sensation; this was especially uncomfortable at night when I positively rustled with every move in bed.

I stuck to very shallow sit up baths for the week, which were manageable, but meant I couldn't have a soothing soak for the irritated skin under the plastic, or for my collection of 20+ midge bites, which happened to be in full angry red cry at the same time. (They were mainly at the front and down my sides - had they been on my back I was worried they might confound the test!) 

The next challenge was finding a friend to carefully peel the sheet off after 48 hours, and then go over all the ink marks again, which would help the nurses figure out which allergen(s) had "gone off" - my back had been divided up in a grid system to accommodate the 50 numbered substances. I enlisted the help of my friend Gillie, who is an artist amongst her many other talents; she did a great job of re-inking my back with the marker pen the clinic had provided. She also photographed the area as soon as the sheet was off.

Two hours later, I was meant to take a photo of my back once it had settled down after the removal of the sheet, so I asked a neighbour to pop over and do the honours (it didn't look any different in fact, but we followed the clinic's instructions to the letter). I tell you, where health matters are involved, living alone can be logistically complicated!

On Saturday I duly went back to Basford, trying and failing to unsee the "Road Work's" and "Delay's" signs again, which were still very much in place. A nurse inspected my back and declared that I had had a reaction to nickel and nothing else. It turns out that they didn't include my other two known irritants in this panel, so I had no way of telling if I was still allergic to those, but the nurse said just to take that as read. I was finally issued with a list of all the things they had tested me for, and it was interesting to note that a few were perfume-related, and hadn't bothered me at all. I had rather assumed this would be so, but it was nice to have it confirmed, as the odd friend has suggested that my perfume hobby might be bothering my skin.

Here are the substances I clocked as perfume ingredients - there may also be one or two more I didn't recognise:

• Balsam Peru
• Fragrance Mix 1 & II (I don't know what was included in these selections)
• Linalool
• Limonene

On an unrelated note, I spotted that allergen No 1 is potassium dichromate. Does anyone remember setting fire to that in chemistry class at school and creating a volcanic eruption? Ah, hold on - I just checked and it was ammonium dichromate, not potassium. Here's a video of the experiment I remember doing - fast forward to a minute in for the main action.

Which nostalgic memory - coupled with the fact that it's that "back to school" time of year - reminded me of covering my new text books in "sticky back plastic" - mostly clear, occasionally with a coloured tint. Now there's a more comfortable use for the stuff! ;)

If you have had patch testing for allergies, I would be interested to know what your findings were  - hopefully nothing perfume-related!

Summer in France: Heat, Howls, Hydrangeas, and Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

It has been a while since my Epona review, which is now on sale for those anxious to try it! I came to France nearly three weeks ago, and have - perhaps counterintuitively - gone and chosen one of the hottest days of the year to sit down and write a blog post finally. It is 38C in the shade today, and was 44C in my car earlier before I got the aircon going. The heatwave has been ongoing since the day after I arrived. No one can possibly believe in that old adage that says men "perspire" and women "merely glow". I am doing a lot more than glowing, let me tell you... I remember my visit in April being the coldest spring trip ever, with the temperature in my house never getting above 13C the whole fortnight. I had five layers on indoors at all times, including a roomy dressing gown over a "coatigan", and prayed to the weather gods that they would make things up to me in July when I came back. Talk about being careful what you wish for!

Heat

You would think the locals would be well used to such searing temperatures, yet the heat is a main topic of conversation in those little exchanges you have with people you pass in the street. There is much sharing of anti-heat strategies (such as closing shutters during the day, which I don't want to do as they are closed most of the year, haha, having a cold shower before bed, laying frozen gel packs on your stomach in the middle of the night etc), and especially suggestions of where to go to instantly feel cool. 

The supermarket (but with the added danger of overspending)

The church (there's a limit to my back's tolerance of a hard pew)

The swimming pool (half an hour in the water, weaving between the Scylla and Charybdis of child-topped lilos, is about my limit)

The library (where the knitting club had a particularly good turnout both weeks I went for this very reason!)

And...drum roll...The "Abyss of Fage", which is a steady 10-13C all year round. I went there yesterday, and overheard visitors saying it would be heaving today, as the temperature was going to be even higher. Down there you actually need a jacket!, but the cold was frankly delicious after the stifling heat above ground.

Howls

The village where my house is has an ever-changing cast of feral cats. There are two main cats on the block at the moment: a shy, and rather beaten up tabby and white that I call "Bruiser Truffle", and a mottled grey cat, who is known amongst English-speaking locals as "The Yowler". 

The Yowler is emaciated and suspected to have worms, but whatever the cause of his extreme vocalising, that cat can howl! It is piercing to the point of ear splitting, and might even be a yowling howling contender for the Guinness Book of Records, like Bella, the cat with the loudest purr.

Same feeding station, different cat

Hydrangeas

I have always been partial to hydrangeas, but on this visit I was struck by how many there are everywhere, and with such enormous blooms! Apparently they have done so well on account of the rain they've had in France - and in England. I have seen every shade of hydrangea on the acidic to ericaceous spectrum, and a friend in the village is kindly keeping me supplied with a single (topheavy!) bloom for my vase.

I also noticed on my sightseeing travels that many of the religious statues were similarly equipped. "What are we going to do with all these hydrangeas??" I can imagine the verger saying, before thinking: "Let's give them to all the Virgin Marys, and the saints if they have room in their niches."

"Oh go on, the cherubs can have one too..."

Walking around the village, there were clumps literally at every turn! Even the dying mop heads had a certain faded beauty to them.

Do you prefer pink? You are never far from the colour of your choice. ;)

Hunting Hidden Hughes Houses

On this holiday I have been reading "An Unauthorised Life" by Jonathan Bate, an absorbing literary biography of the poet Ted Hughes, whose violent, sensual and mythic poems are inextricable from his tempestuous and tragic private life. To lose not one but two wives or girlfriends to suicide on your account - by the same means, even - looks like much more than carelessness, to not quite quote Oscar Wilde. 

Book also accessorised with obligatory hydrangeas

On P175 Bate mentions that Hughes and his wife Sylvia Plath had stayed in a house belonging to American Poet Laureate William Merwin, in Lacam near Loubressac in the Lot. I love houses associated with literary figures, and immediately hatched a plan to seek it out on a circuit of the Dordogne and Lot that also took in Beaulieu and Turenne.

Although I had found a photograph of the Merwin house on the Internet before setting off, I noted in the book that it was well hidden, plus the photo was taken from down the valley looking up at it, rather than from the roadside, so I knew I might have to do some asking around to find the place. The first old honey coloured house I saw in the immediate vicinity of the destination dot on my satnav - which was a bit thrown by the extremely rural nature of the area, and the general lack of buildings of any kind - was perched on a hilltop and reached by a long narrow track. I identified it as some kind of Manoir, and managed to find a phone number, which I duly rang. Turns out that I was in the hamlet before Lacam, but only about 800m away. I was to look out for a house with pale blue shutters, and irises at the front.

No one mentioned the rather distinctive barns!

Five minutes later I was parked up in Lacam and made a beeline for the first house with pale blue shutters, in which a family was having a lazy Sunday lunch with the door open. The wife came out and said I was mistaken - the Merwin house was further along - and immediately abandoned her meal and walked me round the corner to it. More pale blue shutters awaited me, and a flowerbed full of green spears of vegetation that may have been irises once before they died in the heat. ;) No one was in residence, so I had a good nosey round and even stole some string as a trophy(!) that was serving absolutely no purpose on a gate. 

Having successfully found one hidden Hughes house - or "Hughes-related" house to be more exact, as Ted Hughes was only a guest there - I felt I was on a roll, so when neighbours in the village, a couple also called Hughes, suggested that I might care to take a look at a couple of houses they had once owned, I leapt at the chance. The first was an old watermill between Martel and Creysse in the Lot again (The Moulin de Cacrey), which has its own entry in Wikipedia, with the Hughes actually named as past owners; the second was a town house in Creysse itself.

I had been warned that House No 1 was very off the beaten track, and so it proved...the satnav directed me down a gravel path which I decided to walk along in case there was no room to turn round again in the car when the track emerged from the forest. I finally coincided with the red blob on my phone, and found myself staring at a set of wrought iron gates, firmly padlocked. On an adjacent tree was a sign saying: "Beware, guard dog, do not enter!" I consulted my verbal instructions from the Hughes again, and found to my great delight - having feared for a moment that I had come all that way in vain - that I needed to turn left and follow the gravel track up the hill, before cutting through the woods (ignoring the "dead end" sign!) and stepping over a fallen fence at the end of the trail. (I got rather extensively stung by nettles in the process, but considered the collateral damage well worth it as my sense of anticipation mounted.)

Having followed the instructions to the letter, I was rewarded with the sight of a Narnia-like faerie kingdom of dilapidation and disrepair, that nonetheless had a magical charm to it. The Hughes assured me that they had kept the place in good nick in their day. 

The highlight was the mill pond and cliffs behind.

There's a Japanese quality to that picture...

Give those cherubs some hydrangeas! 

There was also a waterfall (former mill race?) and secret streams running beneath stone bridges.

NB I have since learnt that the Moulin de Cacrey was rented for a few summers before the Hughes bought it by Caroline Conran, longtime wife of Terence Conran (of Habitat fame), and stepmother to Jasper, Terence's son by his previous - and arguably more famous - wife Shirley. Had I known this interesting connection in time, I would have brought out my Jasper Conran Woman perfume to France to wear on the day. ;) Here is my mini-review of the perfume (my fifth post on Bonkers from 2009!).

So from the watermill it was on to Creysse itself, and House No 2, known as The Conciergerie. My instructions said it was near the Mairie (town hall) and a tower, and in fact I went straight to it (also with pale blue shutters, as it turned out). However, I wasn't sure I had definitely got the right place, because I had missed the photographs my friends had sent of it in Messenger(!), so I popped up to the Mairie to double check. The Mairie was only open two half days a week, and not on a Tuesday. 

I asked a neighbour, and she wasn't sure, so knocked on the door of the Dutch couple next door, who weren't in. Then she walked me down the hill to the house of an elderly lady who could be seen having her lunch through an open window. Perhaps surprisingly, she didn't know, and sent me to the village's one hotel to ask the woman with glasses (and only her). I spied the bespectacled woman in a back office and summoned her out, and sure enough she knew exactly where I meant and confirmed that I had been right all along...

I had now run out of Hughes houses, however tightly or tenuously construed, but picking up the earlier theme of dwellings connected with writers, I drove on to the village of Saint-Sozy, where I had read that Virginia Woolf (to whom I am very, very distantly related) had once stayed in the Chateau there in 1937. To my consternation, part of the Chateau complex was on fire when I arrived, and fire engines from all over the region were in attendance. 

A great deal of damage was done to the interiors of two towers and their roofs, and it was completely inappropriate to go wandering up there, picking my way over the firemen's hoses which snaked across the road. 

I contented myself instead with a photograph from a distance, a chat with two ladies who lived opposite and were quite traumatised by the incident, and a white Magnum ice cream, which I ate in the village square with this view.

More blue shutters!

Editor's note: I hesitated about whether to add an apostrophe to "Hughes' Houses" and decided not to in the end. But if anyone would like to put me straight on this point of grammar, I would be glad to have it clarified!