Pines, spines, and clementines: A Bonkers Christmas and New Year Round Up

Well, here is another post that has been a long time in coming, but in my defence it hurts to sit, and the latest office trend of 'standing desks' has yet to reach Bonkers Towers. But mindful that it will soon be Shrove Tuesday at this rate, I thought it was high time I wrote a bit about the holiday period, and about taking stock generally.

The three scents of Christmas

A Facebook friend asked me in the run up to Christmas what my three favourite smells were around this time, and I came up with these in about half a second:

• Pine needles (notwithstanding my little artificial tree)
• Myrrh* (a favourite note in perfumes, and also in Bengale Rouge - see below!)
• A successfully roasted turkey (by no means a given in my world)

* As immortalised in the Billy Idol song: "In the midnight hour she cried 'Myrrh, myrrh, myrrh'!"

NB For more on my agonies down the years as to the correct method of cooking a turkey, please see this post. I could add the smell of clementines, given the option of a fourth, but they have their moment later in this post.

Perfumes worn over the holidays

A three way tie between Bengale Rouge, Puredistance GOLD, and Hiuse of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved, all of which feel suitably Christmassy to my nose. I also gave PoaL an airing, inspired by the talk in Liverpool featured in my last post.

Holiday oddities

December was a very sociable month generally, with a total of 25 'socialising units', where a unit is either a party or other event, seeing a friend, or having a long phone conversation with someone. I would have been happy to spread these units out over several months, but that is not the way Christmas tends to go. In amongst all the gatherings, a few amusing things occurred...

Trans terriers, non-binary St Bernards, and universal Christmas cards

Here is the oddest 'envelope' in which I received a Christmas card. It was some kind of brainstorm or checklist used in a gender awareness workshop by a friend who does arts in the community (or something). To me it looks like a tentative way to address a trans terrier or non-binary St Bernard, but I could be wrong. Note the amusing juxtaposition towards the bottom of 'lesbian singer beast lover of artist'.

The card inside was handmade, but quite normal, signed, but not addressed to anyone. That's the second card I had this year where the donor told me to "pick a card, any card!", from a carrier bag full or whatever. "What if it doesn't say my name on it?" I piped up. "None of them do!" The one my friend Mary gave me (she of the trade fair in Brussels where I helped out on the stand) - or which I chose from the fan she held out to be exact - had gone a step further by being completely blank inside; it featured one of her past designs, now gracing soft furnishings by Matalan and IKEA etc. It is so nice in an Indian Paisley type of way - and big! - that I might even frame it. This strikes me as a much more flexible (if less personal ;) ) system than committing to a particular person in writing, and then failing to bump into them that Christmas - or any Christmas. Assuming you are determined not to post the card.

It IS rocket science!

My Christmas Day was uncharacteristically memorable, as I was invited to a lunchtime drinks party - I don't normally go out once I am somewhere for Christmas, as it were, which is usually at home. Anyway, it just so happened that I met an actual rocket scientist(!) from Hyde, whose aunt was killed by Britain's most prolific serial killer, Dr Shipman - either one of those facts would have lent exoticism to the event, never mind both. He featured in some Wallace & Grommit production apparently *as* a rocket scientist. He was wearing a black shirt with planets and slightly sparkly stars on. A waggish friend suggested:

"It'd be good if more people, e.g, [insert name of mutual friend who is a gastric nurse], wore clothes with their day job designed on them."

NB The same waggish friend pointed out that the date I mentioned in my last post as being symmetrical - 19.12.19 - was merely 'repetitive'. He is quite right in fact, plus the 12 rather obstructs proceedings. 

An existential llama crisis 

This Christmas, I gave a friend a tea towel with a knitting theme on it, plus a felt llama tree decoration. A few days ago I received the following message:

"Today the serious debate at home is not are we on the brink of World War III or if ethical veganism is a philosophical belief, but whether we can squeeze the llama gift into the class of an objet d'art or if it has to be classed as a Christmas decoration (the difference of course being consigned to a box or not). Input please!"

To which I replied:

"LOL at your llama dilemma. Or should that be LLOL? I think the string condemns him to Xmas dec status - I've had a similar existential crisis with a gingerbread man in a jaunty tartan scarf."

Oh, and then there was Santa, living it large on the lodger's bed while he was away, and having found the biscuits!

Best new release of 2019

With every passing year, I realise how much I am out of touch with the perfume scene. Other bloggers compile their 'Best of 2019' posts - as I used to do myself indeed - and I only recognise at most one name on the list, haha. This year that name has been Papillon Perfumery's Bengale Rouge. I don't even stop to look out for new things at airport duty frees now - a new release has more or less got to be put into my hand for me to try it, such is the pancake flat state of my perfume passion plateau. So there you go - the best new release of 2019 for me is (by default) Bengale Rouge! To be fair, I suspect it might hold that spot even if I had tried some of the other new things. I haven't even smelt Rose et Cuir by Frederic Malle, though I really don't think it would be for me.

2019 perfumes I might have liked if I had smelt them(!)

To answer this question I took a look at Victoria's round up on Bois de Jasmin, my taste being closely aligned to hers, by and large. The scent that caught my eye in her list was Miller Harris's Sublime Blossom:

"Sublime Blossom is a creamy flower wrapped in musk and sandalwood. The main floral accent here is osmanthus and ylang-ylang, both of which have a luscious fruity nuance."

I am a sucker for ylang-ylang, and recently bought a little bottle of the essential oil for use in the bath. There is more to that story in fact, which I may save for another post about my last trip to the French house...

Then Van Cleef & Arpels Santal Blanc is another of Victoria's picks, and the note list is a little unusual:

Notes: fig, orange, violet, sandalwood, tonka bean and musk

Somewhere I still have the several tonka beans Victoria gave me when I visited her in her flat in Brussels. Given the extraodinary reach of her recent international wanderings, you'd be hard pushed to visit her anywhere these days!

Trying new things 

This year I am not going to bring out the tired old resolutions of yore, like those overly familiar Christmas decorations you can't bring yourself to chuck out. Somewhere at the back of my mind I do of course still want to take 150 minutes of exercise a week - which is only 20 minutes a day after all. I think I am probably doing that already simply by going about my daily business. And then of course I also hope to do press ups against the pantry door while reheating my tea in the microwave, and engage in casual bursts of weight lifting involving tins of beans. Going to bed earlier and cutting down on alcohol are also loose aspirations somewhere in the furthest recesses of my psyche. But no, my actual 'resolution' is to try new things. (Though not necessarily perfumes, as mentioned. ;) )

This started before New Year indeed, when I popped to the corner shop for a half bottle of vodka. That's two firsts in one in fact: buying alcohol in a corner shop, and buying a half bottle of vodka. I have hardly ever bought vodka in my life. But what had happened was that I had succumbed to an impulse buy of a bottle of Diet Coke billed as having a hint of 'festive clementine'. Which had got me thinking about what mixers go with Coke, and vodka popped into my head. Not being a rum person. Or being a rum person, but not in the alcoholic way at least. So I had a vodka and coke with festive clementine, accessorised with a slice of clementine, one of many going slightly hard in the fruit bowl at the time, and looking for any role at this point.

Vodka, hot chilli jam, and a good book

So there was the vodka, plus I am also dabbling in herbal tea (which I hate!) to curtail my caffeine consumption after 4pm. It has only just come to my attention that caffeine has a tremendous half life of something like six hours, which may conceivably be one of the many factors for my poor sleep these days. So great is its half life in fact, that on closer inspection it must qualify as a double life nearly. I have settled on a blend of tea by Pukka called Womankind, which is not too sweet and not too swampy, but still not my thing. The packet is quite pleasing to the eye, but that is not enough even so to endear me to the category.

I have also had a bit of a late onset chutney epiphany - my friend's homemade chilli jam and one with rhubarb and I forget what else. I am experimenting with meditating too, but due to the aforementioned problematic sitting (see below), I may have to come back to that.

Back to my back

The main news to mention from the holiday period is the worsening of a long term niggling back problem: from Boxing Day the pain became more acute in that area, making sitting, standing or lying uncomfortable, which is clearly rather impractical! I have been to see an osteopath whose working diagnosis is a sprained ligament in my pelvis, though tests for other causes are ongoing via my GP. I did fall down stairs in a car park in November, and have done a lot of travelling in 2019 (driving to France and back, touring with the band, carrying luggage and gear and sitting in vans); then I've moved a lot of furniture (including a cast iron grate!), done a lot of housework and bed changing as a result of my venture into Airbnb, and additionally have a decidedly unsupportive office chair, a sporty car seat, a slightly saggy mattress, and a pair of favourite, but unevenly worn shoes that may have thrown my balance off a bit. The cause is probably the cumulative impact of all these so-called 'microtraumas'...

Foxy, but unforgiving...

To put matters right, I have ordered a proper office chair and am investigating a new mattress. My quest began with a little lie down on the Sleepmatch bed in Dreams - best three minutes of the entire holiday(!). It has rollers that come at you from below in unexpected ways, like a funfair machine or mechanical water bed - or like being nuzzled and munched by a recumbent alien wearing a fleecy stocking mask - incredibly sensuous and relaxing, let's just say. I'd have bought that bed if it was for sale. ;). Damn near fell asleep in the shop. You lie there staring at a screen on which pops up your name, a list of recommended mattresses, and how far you are along the firmness spectrum. Answer - hardly at all, which I knew anyway, given the state of my back, and my light weight. 

I didn't end up buying any of the recommended beds though, as the only one that was in my budget had just 800 pocket springs, and I was looking for a minimum of 1000. Still, it confirmed me in my belief that bad backs and firm ('orthopaedic') mattresses are not a match made in heaven, as people used to think.

The osteopath also told me to sleep with a cushion between my knees, a tip which has passed me by all these years, along with the half life of caffeine. Imagine my surprise to learn that the entire Sperrer family - young and older members alike! - have been sleeping like this for years. Here is Val's husband Chris striking the pose. No wonder they are in such tip top spinal health. While on the subject of spines, in German they are known as a 'Wirbelsaeule' ie a 'whirly column'. How much do I love that apt term for the pillar of our anatomy.

Val's husband in supported napping mode.

Book reading goal

I am in awe of Tara of A Bottled Rose's phenomenal reading rate - 50 books last year compared to my measly 12. Arguably, if I had spent more time reading and less time doing all those physical things I mentioned earlier, I might have spared my lumbar area as well as achieved a greater total, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. This year I am aiming for pelvic restoration and a reading tally of 18 books, kicking off the year with the hilarious and oddball "Reasons to be Cheerful" by Nina Stibbe. The first book I have ever come across that is written from the perspective of a dental assistant. Nina Stibbe has been compared to Sue Townsend - quintessentially British, with a fine line in observational humour. I can also thoroughly recommend "A Near Perfect Christmas" by her, with which I kicked off 2019.

As it happens, I recently had an excellent book buying spree in a couple of charity shops, and also received two books for Christmas. I decided to put them on my coffee table to encourage me to make my target this year. I expect there are a few more than 18 in that pile, but I might not take to all of them. And Middlemarch is probably too long to bother with when I am against the clock in this way(!). Plus I have read it already. Ditto To Kill a Mocking Bird, which is in there somewhere, but which I fancy rereading after 40 years or so.

Social media diet

Another way in which I might tip the odds towards reaching my reading goal is to spend less time in 2020 on social media. This encompasses the great vortex that is Facebook, plus Instagram and Twitter (though I hardly use the latter), also Whatsapp, text messages and emails. My virtual life has spiralled out of control lately and it is starting to get me down because of everything else I am not acccomplishing, including reading as I say, but also blogging itself(!). I have three email accounts and counted 37 named folders up to the end of 'D' on one of them. One or two are project or work folders, but the majority are people with whom I have had sufficient exchanges for them to warrant their own folder. I couldn't bring myself to tot up the rest of the alphabet or the folders in the other accounts, though there are fewer associated with those. Then I had 32 active conversations on Messenger going the last time I looked, and about 15 by text. Trying to keep up with it all is much like a fast paced game of Whac-a-Mole, and I don't mean that unkindly. There is never a sense of progress - you respond to one message or email and then another pops up, and then the first again. That constant sense of failure and of letting the people at the other end of these exchanges down by not replying in a timely manner is weighing on my conscience, and I will just have to take things more slowly and accept that I can't keep all the social media plates spinning...I shall probably also miss some people's birthdays and operations, new jobs and lost pets, but for the sake of my own mental health something really has to give.

On nurse duty again, picking up the slack from Ludlow the bear

A word on Truffle

In her comment on my last post, Undina expressed a wish for more news / pictures of Truffle. She is not bringing in mice at the moment, which is great, though doubtless a temporary truce for the holidays. She also pretty much left the decorations alone, though the tree is derisorily small in feline terms. However, she is proving a nuisance by refusing to eat her already rather expensive cat crunchies, favouring instead an even more high end brand called True Instinct, whose strapline ominously reads:

Suffice to say there's been a lot of instinctive desiring going on in this house, which I am trying not to overly indulge.

In her defence, Truffle has been quite loving and lain on me when I have been feeling poorly due to the bad back business, and also reminded me to go and feed my friend M's cat, which was thoughtful of her.

She has also enjoyed a lot of turkey and chicken - I roasted both over Christmas week, and made four lots of soup in all, one of which unsurprisingly involved fowl!

So how has your Christmas been, if it doesn't seem like aeons ago?

Not dogged by illness and with the optimum number of socialising units, I hope!

Happy New Year! Plus flu-induced musings on perfume and life in general, and yet another surfeit of cat photos....

'You're really not very well, are you?'

Getting back to blogging after a month's hiatus is not unlike getting back into exercise after a long absence. Though I wouldn't know about that as I haven't done any exercise yet. Not that I do an awful lot at the best of times. But I thought I'd have a crack at a blog post, even if it isn't overly perfume-themed. My Facebook friends are already aware that my mad work phase in December segued seamlessly into a protracted bout of illness, from which I am only just emerging: I succumbed to a regular cold, which then morphed into this pesky Aussie flu which is doing the rounds. Or maybe it was two separate viruses, not that it matters really. As anyone who has had full-bore influenza knows, it really chops the legs off from under you, such that you would instantly fail the "not too ill to pick up a twenty quid note from the bottom of the drive" test. When the flu was most acute, I stayed in bed for four days straight, drifting in and out of consciousness. As in sleep, sorry - I am not trying to be melodramatic and suggest I was in a coma or anything. Any sound from radio or TV would have been too intrusive, so I just lay there thinking and dozing. Obviously I had to get up periodically to fetch water, or the crispbread bites off which I was largely subsisting at that point. Or to put more crunchies down for the cat.

Before I took to my bed, I took to the sofa.

Oh yes, a special mention is due to Truffle, whose quizzically concerned looks and sustained ownerside vigil were a source of great comfort. On New Year's Eve, a night when I would usually be out whooping it up amongst friends, Truffle lay on my chest with her face pressed to mine, intermittently licking the tip of my nose as if to say: 'You're poorly and I don't like the loud bangs - but we can make our own fun here just as well.' A big thank you is also due to the friends who did 'porch drops' of home made soup, stewed fruit and other nourishing foodstuffs. When you live alone, the good offices of friends are an absolute mainstay.

A change of room is as good as a rest - which we also had!

As the days went by and I felt a bit better, the cat noticed that I was changing levels in the house for a few hours here and there, so she relocated her watch to the radiator cradle in the dining room. At the first sign that I might be tiring and need to lie down again (a daily occurrence over the past week), she would return upstairs and continue her bed sitting duties, whether to one side of me, on me, in the bed, or on the warm spot at the bottom of the bed occupied by the hot water bottle. And eventually, a couple of days ago, Truffle decided that if I was well enough to get dressed I no longer needed constant ministrations, and promptly took up residence again in her cooker top eyrie.

Now although it is customary at this time, I am afraid that there will be absolutely no 'launches of 2017' retrospective from me - and probably never again. I am too far out of the loop to have anything approaching a proper overview of new perfume releases, though I have tested and liked a number of things which were launched last year. In terms of my favourite scented discoveries overall, they might actually be Annick Goutal Songes - in both the edt and edp versions (my only full bottle purchase of the year, and technically a re-discovery!), and House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved. Yep, if you restricted me to just two perfumes - one for summer and one for winter - at the time of writing these may be they. I cannot believe I just limited myself to two perfumes! And of course I reserve the right to change my mind at a moment's notice. I am indebted to perfumers and friends alike for continuing to send me samples, which is the main way I get to try new things these days, apart from my (exceptional) sniffing marathons like the one I had with Undina and Tara last May.

Songes also having a nice little lie down

If I am honest, I would probably not go near the perfume counter of a major department store even if I happened to find myself in one - not without being pushed in that direction. I know how much I already tune out to the fragrance section of Duty Frees in airports these days, albeit their selection is not typically in the same league. I will definitely try new perfumes if they land on my mat or are otherwise put in front of me, but I don't seem to go out of my way to seek things out any more, and a lot of the conversations that go on between perfumista friends pass right over my head. I haven't heard of whole houses, never mind individual scents!

I don't know if this is just a phase or whether my interest in perfume has now muted down to a positively passive level. Given that I already have such a huge stash to use up, it is probably for the best that I don't start developing too many new lemmings.

The night shift

During my time lying in bed all sorts of other random thoughts came to me about my perfume hobby: my attachment to friends is the blogosphere is as strong as ever, if not more so; I am still troubled by cliches in reviews (also from me!), by an excess of flashing, fruit machine-style ads - which to be fair you don't see very often, but I wouldn't like them if I did! - and by unspoken commercial connections between bloggers and perfume houses. As well as relationships that strike me as frankly coercive, whereby bloggers use a degree of emotional manipulation to 'extract' free product from perfumers and/or retailers to use in giveaways, or sell on privately to hapless newbies unaware of the bottles' provenance. I have been that (latter) soldier myself when starting out in this hobby. Nor do I care for perfumes with preposterously blingy bottles and eye-watering price points that cynically target stratospherically rich Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs, though I sense I have a problem with conspicuous luxury in every sphere! I also feel uneasy about decadently swanky perfume launches - apart from anything, the cost of those has got to be going on the price of the perfume...

Some of my sense of detachment from the perfume scene may be attributable to my current difficulties at finding work (notwithstanding the recent overload!). The enforced frugality which inevitably ensues may also have led to an estrangement from consumerism in general. For it is not just the scarcity of work: such projects as I have been offered tend to be pitched at more or less the going rate earnt by Romanian strawberry pickers. It would be unthinkable for a person in full time employment suddenly to be told they will be receiving a third - or even a fifth - of their usual monthly pay packet while doing the same job, yet in the freelance world it is clear that anything goes. So the viability of my current profession, and the need to find more lucrative and/or less stressful alternative sources of income is weighing heavily on me at the moment, such that the notion of buying a new bottle of perfume or an expensive item of skincare feels completely alien. In the event of a fillip to my finances that could of course all change...;)

Purple Christmas gin!

I haven't made any New Year's Resolutions as such, although one or two appear to have made themselves. For example I was very pleased to learn - following a statistical computation worthy of Undina - that in 2017 I achieved my target of an average of 2 alcohol-free days a week, up from 'just over one' in past years going back as far as I can remember. It doesn't sound like much of a lifestyle change, but that still probably equates to 40 days on which I consciously opted not to have a drink when it might so easily have been the default choice before. Thanks to the flu, 2018 has got off to a stellar start in terms of non-drinking: in the first week of the year I have had two days on which I have had a drink, rather than the reverse. So I am well in credit for the rest of the month at least, haha.

(Editor's note: In case I come across as a bit of a lush, I could perhaps add that I do mostly just have one drink at a time, so my weekly units remain within the Government guidelines. ;) )

The other 'not a resolution' that seems to be spontaneously happening - also prompted by my gradual recovery from illness - is reading. I am already 450 pages into the New Year, hurrah!, an unprecedented improvement on my reading rate in past years. I am sorry to report that I read just 11 books in 2017, so didn't quite make my target of one a month. Though work might make a jolly good excuse for December...

Beyond that, I have the usual clutch of vague aspirations: to go to bed earlier, knock off Facebook a bit(!), drink more water, and obey Michael Mosley to the letter and incorporate 150 minutes of medium intensity exercise into my life every week, at all of which I will most likely fail. Inspired by Louise Woollam, I'd also quite like to relearn to crochet...2017 has in fact been a great year for my knitting endeavours, and I have even earnt a bit of money from selling my wares. It is sadly too labour-intensive a hobby to ever become a full-time occupation, but it has its place as a hugely satisfying sideline. Oh, and I am actively considering doing Airbnb, as a friend in the next street makes a tidy living from that, with pretty much zero stress, beyond guests flaunting her house rules of not flushing the wc with the lid up. I have even let in one or two of her clients when she couldn't be around.

'Naja' the scarf

So we will see...2018 is definitely set to be a year of change for me on the work front - it just has to be. I haven't been wearing much perfume while I was ill, but here and there I did dab on a spot of Bois des Iles, which acted as a perfect complementary comforter to the cat. Thanks, Val! There are other perfumes I discovered in 2017 that I fully intend to write about, but simply didn't get round to, so I promise I am still a perfume blogger after a fashion till the fat lady sings. Or the thin lady more like, as I inadvertently lost 9lb over Christmas!

It remains to wish readers near and far a very Happy New Year - I hope your holidays were not characterised by illness or existential doubt. I will be back with perfume reviews in due course, and the inevitable tangential posts on toiletries, travel and Truffle...

Oh, and I am getting a flu jab next year. The requisite tenner is already on the hall table...;)

Halcyon hyacinths, and New Year musings on not being amusing

My cousin's husband (long dead now) used to be the cartoonist for a magazine beloved of the country set, 'Horse & Hound'. I remember how, just before a heart bypass operation, John worked overtime, stockpiling cartoons for when he came out of hospital. 'You see', he explained: 'even if everything goes okay, I don't suppose I shall be feeling madly funny for a while.' By inference, he didn't feel he could submit a cartoon to the magazine if it wasn't amusing, which got me thinking about my own 'house style' on Bonkers. And yes, it struck me that while you, as the reader, may visit the blog for all sorts of reasons, I mostly write with the aim at least of entertaining. And I have been slow getting round to this post, as I haven't felt 'madly funny' myself this week, far from it. But unlike my cousin, I have no posts put by for just such an occasion / frame of mind. T S Eliot famously described April as 'the cruellest month', but January 2015 hasn't been overly kind to put it mildly, and I have felt correspondingly downcast. There's something about living alone that makes bad things happening in the world impinge more, and (to stay with our cartoon theme) I found the Charlie Hebdo business last week very distressing, to the point where I barely slept for two nights in the immediate aftermath. The shock of the Paris attacks was compounded by the sad loss on Friday of one of our perfume community, Tama Blough. Although on the cards, her eventual passing came sooner than expected, just two months into her prognosis of six. One small piece of good news is that Buster, Tama's cat, has already found - and moved to - a new 'forever home' nearby. I was nearly considered as a potential owner myself, but only because one of Tama's friends mistakenly thought I was in Connecticut. ;)

I know my own problems - difficulties sleeping, an ongoing lack of work, an expensive repair on the car - pale into insignificance compared with recent events, but the combination of weariness, worry and gloomy news has made me greet the New Year with less of that 'shiny new diary' gung-ho spirit to which I am usually as prone as the next man. But I thought I would have a go at a bit of a 2014 review or New Year stock take, call it what you will. It may be odd, mind, and not especially perfume-forward, I warn you...;)

New launches and hiding under a rock

To jump start my look back at the past year in perfume terms - and spurred on by Undina's traditional analysis of how many scents she tested in 2014, by which brands, and how many of them were new releases etc - I fetched out my perfume diary and started flicking through. Here I had faithfully documented what I wore each day. It was clear that I was sometimes testing several things, or partly wearing familiar scents and partly testing new ones. I soon got bogged down, however, on realising that I didn't know if I was in fact testing or wearing a given scent, ie I simply couldn't remember what I already knew. Nor could I distinguish the perfumes released last year from ones from previous years, though all that could have been ascertained with a bit of digging around, had I really cared.

Evidently also a drinking diary

As I continued to flick through, it was clear that not many of the perfumes tested had made much of an impression on me, which is consistent with Undina's own low success rate in such sessions. And significantly, most of any testing I have done was invariably prompted by samples sent to me spontaneously by companies or received as extras in swaps, rather than burning lemmings I have tracked down, though there were a few of those too. The thing is - and I am a little ashamed to say it - nowadays I can quite happily go to an event at Les Senteurs or wherever and hardly sniff anything. I will also walk right through Duty Frees at airports, barely taking in what is new, despite prominent displays specifically designed to intercept the captive traveller with time on their hands. These days I am so lazy and 'not bovvered' in fact, that I can't even manage to put the proper accents in some of the perfumes listed below.

Scented discoveries (from 2014 or otherwise)

One key exception to this tuning out to new - or newish - launches is Tauer's PHI Une Rose de Kandahar from 2013, of which Val of APJ gave me a precious vial in February, and which turned out to be a lemming of the highest order. If I had to pick my top perfume discovery of last year, that would be it, albeit I tried so little in the grand scheme of things that it is not as great an accolade as it might be coming from bloggers who have explored many more new offerings on the market. Penhaligon's Tralala would be the worthy runner up.

My one *new* bottle purchase of the year (Lidl excepted)

In terms of other new perfume loves that are not necessarily year-specific, Estee Lauder's Bronze Goddess and Hermes Eau des Merveilles are two key ones to cite, along with Guerlain Attrape-Coeur and Shalimar Extrait, Ann Gerard Perle de Mousse, Vero Profumo Mito Voile d'Extrait and Extrait, Farmacia SS Annunziata Vaniglia del Madagascar, Chanel Coromandel, Annick Goutal Songes and Black Flower Mexican Vanilla from the Dame Perfumery in Scottsdale. (Thanks to Undina, Lila das Gupta, Tara of OT, Liz Moores of Papillon Perfumery and Blacknall Allen of aperfumeblog for the above!). I also had an unexpected rapprochement with Chanel No 5, on discovering that Lidl's latest dupe of a mainstream scent had fallen far of the mark. And there are doubtless a few others that will occur to me presently.

It's more about the people than ever before 

Yup, 2014 has resoundingly shown me that I am more interested than ever in talking to people at fragrance events and meet ups, rather than taking this unparalleled opportunity to test the many perfumes all around us. For I have formed deep and rewarding friendships with a number of perfumistas, some of which have escalated to the next level: visiting them in their homes, and even staying the night in a couple of instances - hospitality I would be glad to reciprocate. ;)

Russian doll-reflected perfumistas

I am belatedly bonkers about skincare

Readers may well have noticed a number of 'beauty posts' creeping into the blog lately, and though I feel my recent waves of frenetic research have run their course for now - not least because I can't afford to buy anything else! - I think that to be purely practical about it, good skincare products are more necessary for me at this time of my life than the next lovely perfume. After all, I already have umpty dozen scents to choose from, and something that smells good is an embellishment at the end of the day - albeit a mood-enhancing and transformative one. Skincare, meanwhile, can address actual physical problems like my pesky chronic acne and the damage from decades of kamikaze sunbathing, as well as setting you on course to arrest or at least slightly mitigate the ageing process. I'm 55 after all - it's not too late exactly to take corrective action, but oh, how I wish I had started a sensible regime thirty years ago...

My redeployed cutlery drainer

Slowing down and easing up

I have talked about the principle of 'slow blogging' in previous 'stock taking' posts, and am still convinced of its merits. Additionally, a change I would like to make this year is to slow down in terms of my electronic life generally: 'engaging' with fewer blogs perhaps, and focusing on the ones with whom I have a personal connection, checking emails less frequently throughout the day and taking longer to reply to them, to avoid what I shall elaborately - and possibly impenetrably - call 'Groundhog Day ping pong syndrome'. Then I hope to spend less time on Facebook, where I am mercilessly teased for one thing, and which is the most terrible vortex at the best of times, even though I do like interacting with people that way. But it's a time-sucking curate's egg all right, not to mince metaphors about it. I am also trying to wind down before bedtime, which means resisting the urge to go online in the last hour or so of the evening, as the blue light emitted by electronic devices, coupled with the general mental stimulation entailed, is almost certainly a key factor in my inability to get to - and stay - asleep. That and my middle-aged bladder, of course.

Look, no phone!

To this end I am also trying mindfulness, or rather a somewhat simplifed version known as 'McMindfulness'. When practised last thing at night, it morphs into the equally snappily named 'beditation'. Interestingly, a psychologist writing for The Guardian urges people to have ONLY these three New Year's resolutions and to ditch the rest:

1) Take up meditation
2) Stop doing something (ie the opposite of the usual injunction to take up a new sport, hobby etc, but rather to find something in your life - whether a person or activity or goal or state of mind which is unhelpful / too hard / consuming of time and emotional energy etc - and drop it.
3) Go easy on yourself in reference to 1) and 2), or more widely!

Therapeutic Tara

'Consider the hyacinths...'

Right, so that is not exactly how the Biblical quotation goes, but I am sure the sentiment transfers across species. For I must say that in all my low level agitation so far this month, I have found a lot of solace and a calming quality in a potted hyacinth a friend gave me for Christmas. It is going over now, with brown bits starting to colonise its white tendrils, but every time I walk into the kitchen I sniff it, and the flower's sweet narcotic scent seems so restful and somehow so sufficient unto itself, just like the non-spinning lilies of the New Testament. Which is not to say that I am poised to abandon manmade perfumes any time soon - not at all - but it was a nice object lesson in the simple pleasures of life, including scented ones. Which, if the work situation doesn't improve, may take on a greater importance by and by.

Anyway, as warned, that was an odd 'round up' post, but I hope to be back next time with something a touch more lighthearted - and squarely perfume-related. Oh okay, that might be pushing it...;)

Has your New Year got off to a more upbeat start, or have you felt a bit weighed down with the cares of the world, or your own?

Liz Moores - a pint-sized tonic who punches above her height!