Bonkers about Perfume and the Bonkers kitten turn six (years and weeks old respectively)!

Well, technically the six-themed milestone for both my blog and my upcoming new feline arrival was Sunday just gone. However, though I managed to go and visit her - and take an utterly preposterous number of photos, much like her full name (big - or should that be long? - reveal to follow) - I was dogged again by a chronic headache for much of the rest of the day (to mix my animal metaphors slightly). The headache has been hanging around for six days now in fact, though I feel a little better at the time of writing.

So yes, 25th October, 2009 saw my first post on Bonkers - about the genesis of the blog, where I explain the strange phenomenon of Sudden Onset Perfume Mania which descended on me some 18 months before thinking of writing about scent in the public domain. I am surprised to have kept it up as long as I have, albeit there has been the odd hiatus along the way - notably in the summer of 2012, when I moved house. And I did seriously consider kicking the blog into touch a few times as well: once when it was hijacked by an Israeli site, once when I ruffled a few feathers with a guest post on Now Smell This, which I shan't even link to in case I ruffle a few more(!), and once when my blog template got accidentally corrupted to the point where I had to set it to Private until a friend kindly unscrambled it for me over the course of two nights' work on his part.

I have noticed that some of my 'generation' have also slowed down their pace of blogging or stopped altogether - The Left Coast Nose, Another Perfume Blog and Parfumieren being three much missed examples of 'retired blogs'. And while they each had their own reasons, maybe it is natural to move on to other things after x number of years, because of the not inconsiderable time and effort involved in blogging. I may well get to that point too by and by. Though we do also have examples of behemoth blogs such as NST, The Non-Blonde and Bois de Jasmin, which have been going for much longer than me - and maintained an impressive posting schedule to boot. For myself, I shall continue to pootle on on this ad hoc frequency of 'about a week'-ish, and see where that goes...

Source: pinterest

Oh, together with a number of bloggers 'on the scene', I recently took part in a survey hosted by a postgraduate student at a Swiss university on the subject of the influence of perfume blogs. It was quite an interesting and thought provoking exercise, and I might post my answers in full in a later post, but it is perhaps appropriate on my anniversary to mention here how I answered this multiple choice question about why I blog in the first place. The options were:

'Because you would like to...

1. 'influence people'
2. 'inform'
3. 'warn'
4. 'educate'
5. 'because you enjoy it, because you are communicative'
6. 'because your followers value your opinion'

So I replied:

'Quite simply - to entertain, which is closest to your #5, though not the same. Perfume is a hook on which to hang what I hope are amusing posts - oh, and I also write travelogues, which have the same aim, and may feature perfume sniffing along the way.'

Though increasingly they don't, haha! And it seems only a matter of time before my compulsive collecting of wool aka 'yarn harlotry' creeps into a blog post, that being the other key 'pillar' amongst my interests. Well, soon to be joined by the Bonkers kitten, with whom I expect I shall spend a fair amount of time playing wool games of one kind and another.

So I went to see her on Sunday, as I say, and she was as enchanting and cute as ever, if not more so. My Facebook friends will already be aware that the kitten's mother was killed in a hit and run incident two weeks ago, but most fortuitously, the mother cat's mother happened to have had a litter of her own just four days previously, and by the end of that sad day had stepped into the breach and started to feed her three orphaned grandkittens. She was still feeding them on an 'on demand' basis during my visit, bless her. ;)

The owner said that out of all the kittens, my one - and one other - were the most loving, in terms of liking to sit on laps and be cuddled, which is all very promising. She added that if I had picked Betty - a grey tabby - she would  have been a little more concerned, as Betty is a bit more self-contained, and a darn sight more mischievous than Truffle.

Which brings me lastly to the 'long reveal' of the Bonkers kitten's name, prompted partly by the fact that the owner latched onto one of the names on the shortlist a couple of weeks ago and started to call her 'Truffles' off her own bat. ;) My brother said that Truffles plural sounds a bit like a 1930s burlesque dancer, while it reminds me of someone doing a whole box of Ferrero Rocher watching Strictly. So I will probably singularise the  name when she comes. The other kittens have also all got rather sweet names now, to wit: Lottie, Simba, Betty (as mentioned), Cleo and Willow.

Oh....and Truffle's full name is...brace yourselves!...'Truffle Ganache Salome Bonkers' - or just 'Truffle Musson', obviously, if she is visiting the vet. The complete and decidedly bonkers suite of names was designed by committee, which says it all, really. But I'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who came up with such a variety of thoughtfully chosen suggestions. I can assure you that they all went into the pot for consideration, even if, as it turns out, a rather eclectic 'dish' of nomenclature has come out of it again.

And lastly it remains to thank readers everywhere for your interest in Bonkers, however long or short a time you have been reading. If there are any types of posts you would like to see featured on here, let me know in the comments. And if you think that I should continue to resist sneaking wool-themed posts in, do please speak up. Also if you love dogs. Actually that might just be too bad. But I realise I am already digressing quite a bit from the supposedly core topic of perfume with my travel / band-related posts, so there may be a natural ceiling to the number of permissible tangents I can go in, hehe.