Bonkers has clocked up a million hits!

I was on the phone to Vodafone just now, querying some WAP charges on my phone bill, when I spotted that my blog was only four page views off a million! I had realised over the weekend that this was imminent, and wanted to be around to photograph the moment when the counter clicked through into a number with lots of noughts - just as my brother and I used to eagerly anticipate the odometer in the family car reaching each milestone (quite literally!) of 20,000, 30,000 miles etc. Probably more, as we always had rather second hand cars growing up.

Anyway, it has only taken five and a half years to get to this point** ;), but it feels quite momentous all the same, possibly because of the fact that - so far! - I have been the only writer on Bonkers. And coincidentally, my 500th post was only the other day, which also felt like another milestone.

So I took a wee look at my stats out of interest, and wasn't surprised to learn that one in six of all the hits I have ever received has been on a post about Lidl's range of perfumes! Just on their own, the two posts I wrote on the Coco Mademoiselle dupe, Suddenly Madame Glamour, account for about 1 in 9 of all hits, ie 113,610 between them. The only other post to have notched up a serious amount of page views is one I wrote on a retinol cream, Indeed Labs Retinol Reface, which came in at 23,131. I wasn't expecting that piece to have had so many readers, as there are many noted beauty blogs out there you would think people would find before me. But such are the vagaries of Google!

I will be back shortly with a review of a new perfume that came to my attention recently, from a house that seems refreshingly quirky and trend-bucking in every way...

And meanwhile, it remains to thank everyone who has been reading Bonkers on whatever frequency - including the many thousands of people who landed here by mistake ;) - for taking this tally to its nought-intensive total today! I may well host a giveaway soon to mark this occasion...

**Editor's note - I didn't actually install the Google statcounter until quite some time after I started the blog - I don't recall exactly when, possibly even a couple of years later, when Bonkers was still very small anyway. I was hoping it might manage to pick up past hits retrospectively, what with Blogger being part of Google, but I never figured out whether it had or not, because I forgot to look at the stats until much later, by which time you could no longer tell if this was a complete count or not. So I just accepted its tally as being my total hits, whether from the start or whenever. A bit like a child not being two till it's four, type of thing. Bonkers being Bonkers, you could say that such statistical oddities are no less than you would expect.

Chromatically correct (scented) candles, and a Lidl bit of customer care (Suddenly!)

Lidl Suddenly Madame Glamour the candle - aka scenting your house with ambient Keira Knightley

Apologies for the longer than normal hiatus since my hyacinth post - why, that is nearly assonance, though not quite! I managed to climb out of my temporary slough of despond as the month went on - thanks to the encouraging comments from readers, a spot of 'beditation', avoidance of the news, and (latterly) the comforting furry presence of my sometime cat boarder, Speights. He stayed for ten days, and his toy-savaging and other antics are lovingly chronicled on Facebook if you are my friend over there. And now, finally, I have a bit of work at last, which has given me a further fillip, but of course less time for blogging!

I did want to cover a couple of Lidl-related topics in this post, though: the first concerns the Suddenly Madame Glamour scented candle @ £3.99, in an on-message pink colour. For like the Tiny Tears doll of my youth - or rather not of my youth, as my mother wouldn't let me have one, because it was all too anatomically correct - so a pink shade for a candle based on a Coco Mademoiselle perfume dupe is chromatically correct. This candle may have been out for a while, but I only spotted it in the run up to Christmas. Anyway, I had to have a sniff, and it is a very faithful rendition of Coco Mademoiselle, as candles go - a pretty blunt and forgiving medium, admittedly. The scent was not overtly synthetic or over the top, as scented candles can so often be. I have spent hours in the untidy and ransacked aisles of T K Maxx, systematically sniffing every scented candle whose packaging is remotely broachable by the uncommitted customer, and believe me, I have smelt a few frogs in my time. So I would commend the candle to anyone who likes Suddenly Madame Glamour or Coco Mademoiselle and who would be happy to scent their home with even a suggestion of the wispy, wafty, diaphanous Keira.

I didn't buy one, I might add, as I prefer my scented candles to be more meditative and not mere replicas of a perfume that I love. Yes, I have just realised that I never seek out the candle corollary of a perfume I know and rate, but rather other combinations of notes that make for a happy and low key bouquet, invariably along the woody / incensey spectrum - or maybe involving sandalwood. Only ever a hint of vanilla, mind, as it is a slippery slope to the hellish sticky fug of cheap vanilla tea lights.

Yes, it's shaped like a pineapple, but no, it shouldn't be yellow

But more than that, I realised that regardless of how much I liked its scent, I couldn't have a pink candle in the house. Not simply because I don't have a room where baby pink could possibly coordinate with the existing scheme, but because I don't hold with the idea of a coloured candle in the first place. My rummaging in T K Maxx has thrown up the occasional mud-toned candle, and ones in pale teal and - God forbid - purple. They are just wrong on every level. Okay, wrong on the chromatic level for starters - and often the more vivid the hue, the more trashy the scent, though it doesn't always follow, as in our present case indeed. Yes, the default colour for ALL candles, irrespective of scent, is white. I didn't realise I had such strong views on the point, but seeing this pink candle in Lidl focused my mind wonderfully.

I know Christmas is over, but at least it's white

A Lidl bit of customer care (Suddenly!)

The other Lidl-related matter I wanted to mention is my attempt to return a spare bottle of Suddenly Woman 1. Actually both bottles I bought - having fatally succumbed to a BOGOF deal of two for £7 - are superfluous to requirements, but obviously I can't take back the one I opened. I assumed the other one might be a contender for a refund or credit note or something. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the receipt, but given the uniqueness of the product and the fact that I couldn't very well have bought it anywhere else, I thought I was in with a good chance. Well, as long as they didn't think I had stolen it of course.

Intercepting a sales assistant in free circulation in Lidl is a bit like spotting a hoopoe - they do exist, but a fair bit of 'active loitering' is required to hunt one down in their retail habitat. After ten minutes of cruising the aisles, I collared a chap filling the ready meal freezer and explained my predicament. 'Oh, not having the receipt won't be a problem' he reassured me with a smile and outstretched arm, 'take the box and go and see my colleague on Till 2.' So I hotfooted it over to where I was directed, but the check out assistant said tersely: 'Oh, he gave you wrong information - he's new here. You can't have a refund without a receipt unless you contact Customer Services first and get a reference number. The number to call's on the back of the in-store magazine - here.'

Source: birdforum.net

So back home I went and rang Customer Services, who firmly told me that I had been given duff gen in store by both SA No 1 and No 2, and that I wasn't entitled to a refund at all, because I had crucially lost the receipt. They said I could write in and dispute the policy if I wished. So I spent an hour crafting a perfect complaint letter, explaining that I understood that because of their low prices, Lidl may not be able to offer as generous / flexible a returns policy as other retailers. Then I based my main argument around the fact that I had been given conflicting - and progressively more discouraging - information by three separate Lidl staff, and that this was tantamount to 'messing with my mind'.

So I had the letter all ready to go on the hall table the next morning, when I received a phone call from the same Customer Services lady, announcing brightly that she was mistaken and that she could give me a reference number and I could get my money back after all.

So, a clear case of the left hand not knowing what the right hands are doing - all two of them! - or even what the left hand itself is doing, come to that - but a result for me, and I am now all of £3.99 richer, not just the £3.50 that I actually paid, though I came clean about that.

So when it comes to scented candles, where do you stand in the 'the only colour is white' debate?

And do you have any heartwarming - as in 'change of heart'-type - stories about returning unwanted perfume - or do your (involuntary) albatross sanctuaries simply keep growing?