Dawn Spencer Hurwitz versus Domestic Short Hair: Truffle, the feline felon, finally finds a furry Foxy fragrance!

Foxy detail from my new office chair

Okay, so that was a lot of alliteration, sorry. The 'f' words provide quite rich pickings in that regard. Now it so happens that almost eight years ago to the week, I wrote this highly silly post, exploring the potential crossover between perfume house names and other, more banal acronyms. I was inspired to pursue this whimsical line of inquiry by the sudden connection I made when looking at my late cat Charlie Bonkers' vet record card, which described her as 'DSH', short for 'Domestic Short Hair'. We perfumistas are really big on abbreviations, which often have an additional received hierarchy of upper and lower case letters - PoaL (Portrait of a Lady) springs to mind - and I immediately thought of Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. And Dawn Spencer Hurwitz led in the 2010 post to Strange Invisible Perfumes (Self Invested Pension), Parfumerie Generale (Parental Guidance), and much more nonsense in similar acronymic vein.

Fast forward to 2018 (or a recent year, certainly, as my sense of time is a little sketchy these days), when I fell hard for the furry animalic amber beauty that is DSH Foxy. Dawn sent me a selection of samples of her newest releases, all in dinky little roller ball pots, and that was my standout favourite, closely followed by Zibeline. These tiny pots are a perfect sample size, but also quite easy to lose, as it turned out...I should know better than to leave small, easily battable objects on my desk. For I have a cat - a different cat now, also a Domestic Short Hair, you know the one - though I note on a veterinary site from which I ordered a flea treatment at the weekend that to avoid confusion, the DSH option has been renamed 'Regular Moggy'. I can't see my vet changing his record cards to something quite so colloquial any time soon...

So yes, you can guess what is coming next...at some point, not long after receipt of the sample of Foxy, the cat knocked the pot-ette from my desk and promptly made off with it. I do occasionally clean the house, but in the intervening months it never came to light again. Till the other night, when Truffle picked up a pencil in her mouth from under my nose and started 'hunting it' on the floor, as she does.

I knew exactly where this story would end up...the pencil would roll under the wardrobe or the bookcase, and Truffle would reach under each piece of furniture in turn with her paw, but fail to get purchase. The hidden recesses of my office have become something of a graveyard for pencils, but frankly I have enough overall to allow for half a dozen or more to go awol. It was purely the annoying scrabbling noise that Truffle made in her efforts to retrieve this latest pencil that made me lie down beside her and start reaching my own arm blindly under the wardrobe to see what I could feel.

The first object I retrieved was a petrified apple core, sympathetically juxtaposed with a William Morris print.

The next object was the little roller ball pot of DSH Foxy! Oh how happy I was to clap eyes on that again - there are probably three more wears in there.

I never did find the pencil...

Full view of foxy chair

Does your cat routinely steal and secrete small objects? If so, what?

And have you ever lost a beloved perfume sample, only to have it turn up unexpectedly months or even years later?

My as yet unhunted pencil stash