Becalmed, bemused, and beset by doubts: a belated Bonkers bulletin

 

I have been blitzing my Christmas cards this week, and while writing them I re-read a handful from last year where the sender had included a long message on the card or in a separate letter. Two of these friends - neither of them perfume lovers, or even wearers for all I know - urged me to carry on with the blog: one said they enjoyed the French travelogues in particular, and another that it was a good way to keep in touch with my news. Then last week I also caught up with a long lost fellow student from my university days, who revealed that he had also been reading Bonkers, pretty much from start to finish(!), while conceding that he skimmed over the posts that were overly perfume-y in their focus, which - mercifully for his sake - is most of them. I was still extremely impressed (and flattered) by his tenacity to work his way through 16 years' worth of output, however cursorily here and there. 

During my absence from the blogosphere I have still had many conversations with friends - and strangers! - about scent, and about smells more generally. My hairdresser turned out to have tried a couple of Byredo dupes in T K Maxx (Safran Noir and Mystique by Milestone Perfumes), while a checkout lady at Home Bargains enlisted my help to identify the source of a nasty plastic smell, inviting me to sniff the pile of 30p bags for life by her till. "I don't think it's coming from these", she mused, "I bet it's from these dearer thicker ones I keep under the counter. The smell must be wafting up..." "Oh yes, smell this", she added, thrusting a boxy plastic tote in my face. Well, I couldn't smell anything untoward, and was awestruck at the keenness of her nose.

All of the above reminded me that I haven't posted anything since April, and got me wondering why. But first, on a side note, I am still using that Effaclar Duo spot zapper cream that features in my last post - on two impudent red bumps on my chin currently - and very good stuff it is too.

I think the first reason for my silence is that I said to myself that if I parked the blog, I would have more time to devote to travel writing, which was something I have always felt more qualified to do than posting about perfume. I had long given up the idea of a book with a narrative arc, so was thinking more along the lines of a collection of pieces drawn from my travels to the house in France, or my adventures on work trips, or on tours with the band. Sorry to say that I have probably spent about half a day in total on sorting out some material to include(!). Probably about 10,000 words' worth, but that is not much to show for an eight month hiatus.

 

 

Another reason - though this only applies to the last two months - has been my grief at the loss of Truffle. For readers who are not in contact with me on Facebook or Instagram where I announced this news, she was hit by some kind of vehicle back in September, possibly by an electric scooter or bike that was riding on the pavement, as she was very "car aware". I'll never know, but due to her catastrophic injuries I had to instruct the vet to put her to sleep over the phone, as I was in France when this happened. I felt terrible that I hadn't been at home at the time, and with Truffle at the end, but on the other hand due to my pathological blood phobia it was perhaps for the best that I wasn't there, and that her heroic cat feeder dealt on the ground with the whole tragic business. 

A third reason is my feeling conflicted lately about the direction the perfume market is going in: on the one hand, there seems to have been a major hike in the prices of niche and designer brands lately - which may well be for justifiable reasons, but this isn't obvious to the consumer. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale there has been an explosion in dupe companies, possibly profiting from customers' unwillingness or inability to shell out over a ton sometimes for 50ml - I remember when that size of bottle cost more like £60. The erosion of market share brought about by these copycat scents may in turn force the established brands to recoup their losses by upping their prices even further. I do understand how the brands feel betrayed, but I am also uncomfortable about the unaffordability of fragrance these days for those on a modest income. It's a conundrum. Travel sizes / purse sprays are certainly a helpful solution in those circumstances, though they are not always available, or not singly. And apart from this head to head battle, there is my ongoing gripe about the proliferation of new (supposedly niche) brands, keen to jump on the bandwagon of what is still a high margin product, but failing to produce scents of true quality. I don't doubt that there are interesting, mould-breaking brands tucked away somewhere in the tsunami of new launches, but I simply don't have the strength to winnow the chaff and find them. I still enjoy wearing perfume, but - perhaps unfairly - have zoned out to the myriad new kids on the block.

 

A fourth reason is the rise of Chat GPT!, and the realisation that it could eventually make me redundant. Don't laugh, but I asked it to write a perfume review in the manner of Bonkers about Perfume, and in about three zillionths of a second it came up with something eerily close to my house style. It had a gratifying amount of alliteration in the title, hehe, of which I can only recall "Vexatious Vetiver" - unfortunately the original seems to have disappeared. I asked it to have another go, and it answered:

 "Here's a fresh one for you - a perfume review in the style of Bonkers about Perfume (warm, chatty, slightly rambling, gently self-mocking, with domestic asides and an amused tone)."

Why, that's me to a "t"! Or how I aspire to be. This new content was also scarily similar to a Bonkers post, and entitled: "Review: Moonlit Tea and Crumpled Linen by La Maison Imaginaire". Does Chat GPT realise that that is almost the name of an actual brand? I might post a couple of them sometime - it is astonishing that a piece that might take me several hours to write can be spewed out at the speed of light.

Then there's the fifth reason, which I am not happy about and trying most vigorously to bat away, namely the niggling worry that applying perfume on skin may have some cumulatively harmful effects in the body. I don't know which ones or how much, or after how many years of wearing - if at all! - but there is so much on social media at the moment about the dangers of UPFs, and microplastics, and pesticides on fruit and veg, and environmental pollutants in our water and air, that after a while the fear starts to seep in and make you start to doubt the perfumes you know and love. I am aware that fragrances have had to be reformulated because of carcinogenic concerns hanging over a particular ingredient in a particular combination / quantity, so there must be a grain of truth in it. "So are vintage perfumes less safe then?", my runaway imagination inquired. I am categorically not one of those "Ooh, it's made of chemicals, I shan't touch that" kind of people, but I know that aromachemicals can end up in adipose tissue, the liver and kidneys, and my kidney function has fallen quite sharply in recent years. That may be pure coincidence - correlation is not causation! - and due to something else entirely, but I don't want to put my kidneys under any more strain than I do already by asking them to process the likes of crisps, cheese and ham in my diet.

So there you have it...five reasons for my blog resembling the Marie Celeste. I am not sure where I go from here, or what angle to pursue, if I pursue any at all. I shan't start vlogging, which I know is becoming a key way people "consume" their perfume reviews these days. It's the equivalent of voice notes on WhatsApp, you could say. Some of these videos can be quite long, with unboxings and preambles and whatnot, and you have to watch the whole thing to get to the crux of whether the reviewer actually liked the scent or not - you can't quickly scroll through to get to the key points. But writing generally seems to be on the wane, which may be another reason (No 6!) why I feel Bonkers about Perfume in its present format may have almost run its course.

On the plus side, I have read 61 books so far this year ;), which I may share with readers as I did back in January. So there may be a flutter of life in the old blog yet...

Where are you with your love of perfume? Is it still tiggerish and burning bright, or has your mojo slowed, or even hit the buffers?

 

One last Truffle pic...

 

Perfumista samples site, and how Robin made me blog again

Princess Diana rose

I have been away too long. Too long from the blog, and from the perfume scene generally. I have not been completely asleep on the job, but have largely got tip offs about new releases from other blogger friends, and occasionally still from a perfumer directly. I read just two fragrance blogs regularly, and comment on both. In the old days it was upwards of 20. I wear perfume fitfully, but always with enthusiasm when I remember to do so. I am not making great inroads into my SABLE*, but it gives me pleasure to drain the odd 1ml sample or little decant every so often. A few things have turned while I wasn't looking, but we are none of us getting any younger.

Yet perhaps unexpectedly, it is my recent distracting health issues that have led me back to perfume. I am still being investigated for a couple of issues, while a few others have been diagnosed, or have disappeared as mysteriously as they came, or been relegated to the "to be monitored" (aka "too hard") pile. Harrowing as the process has been at times, I am so grateful to have been scanned from top to toe, as I mentioned in my earlier posts. Last week saw my eyeballs join the list, with bones to follow next month. Somewhere along the way, a consultant said he really liked me, as I was "unusual", which was a tonic in itself. ;) Another doctor said he believed in "treating the person rather than the test results", while conceding that I had managed to clock up a startling number of abnormal findings in recent months which would worry anyone.

So this unsettling experience - compounded by a spike in neighbour bother, on which I shan't dwell here - led me to crave rose perfumes of late, which I do periodically in times of stress, ever since I hit the menopause. I have been enjoying them in my garden too, while the friend who painted my flittersniffer avatar (David Gleeson) gave me a 'Princess Diana rose' from his, so one way and another, the flowers and their scents have been on my mind. 

A cursory rummage in my perfume wardrobes (literally!) was enough to establish that I own very few rose-centric scents anymore. I have Bvlgari's Rose Essentielle, which I wore to my dad's funeral, but it is quite modern in style. I was after something lush and multi-layered, like Keiko Mecheri's Mogador, which my friend Jessica found for herself after a long and winding quest. A veritable feather bed of petals you can sink into with your nose, you know the sort of thing. Or indeed the late lamented Creed Fleur de The Rose Bulgare, which Bois de Jasmin rates very highly: "After a somewhat perfume-y and oddly 'green' start, this one is unmatched rose verisimilitude". Hiram Green's Lustre also ticks the box, but a vegan friend has fallen in love with it, and I wouldn't part them for the world, while the other rose scents in my collection are wintery, or dark, or spicy, or powdery, or linear, or have a goodly dollop of Tauerade. I couldn't find a single soliflore in my drawer. ;)

Minutes later, I had clicked on a perfume sampling site called "Perfumista" (a very good name to appeal to our community!), and scored a 5ml decant of Parfumerie Generale Brulure de Rose, and a 1ml sample of Diptyque's Ilio, my curiosity about which had been piqued by Undina's recent review. I hunted for the chilly new Serge Lutens she also reviewed - La Dompteuse Encagée - but to no avail. They were out of the Hiram Green as well, though I was impressed the brand was even stocked. I wracked my brain for other scents I had heard about lately, and rootled around in Jo Loves, Jo Malone, Tom Ford and Hermes, then left it at that. And I know Brulure de Rose isn't a soliflore either, but I miss having a bottle, and 5ml should keep the lemmings from the door for a bit. They don't do Keiko Mecheri in fact, though I did look. An impressive range of niche lines nonetheless.

'Thinking of you' 

The Perfumista site offers free delivery on orders over £10, which is great, as I expect to buy at least £25 worth of something (invariably wool!) to qualify for that perk. A slightly irritating thing about the website - as it displayed on my laptop anyway - is that it was impossible to scroll down the brand list beyond the M row, no idea why. I viewed the site on my mobile instead (where brands appeared under the Categories tab, somewhat illogically) to refresh my mind about what else I might be interested in.

And I am writing about this site before the perfumes have even arrived, because the mere fact of my having bought them - like in the good old days of The Perfumed Court! - is noteworthy enough, I felt. Today I have gone back into Google to see what other sites are out there now (I may be the last person to know about them all, haha), and on the first page of results I clocked Fragrance Samples UK, Perfume-samples, and Scent Samples, all of which were new to me. I have been away too long, as I say.

So how, you may ask, does Robin come into it? That would be Robin of Now Smell This of course, though I hardly need to mention that I am sure, as her blog is a cross between a behemoth and a bellwether; it is the CNN of the blogosphere, and a bottomless resource in more ways than you can shake a blotter at. I am in awe of the work Robin has put into maintaining the site all these years. She is a tower of strength and endurance, no question. And of course I once had a couple of guest posts on there in 2012 (well, one on NST itself and a companion post the next day on Bonkers); unfortunately they led to a barrage of trolling, and got me banned from linking to the blog on Facebook for three years, which I admit to thinking a disproportionate response at the time. ;) [Links on request for anyone who missed the whole kerfuffle and may be curious.] Anyway, I was looking to see if Robin or anyone at NST had also reviewed the new Serge Lutens, and then thought to check her blogroll to see if I was even still on it, and miraculously I was! It was quite a sobering read, mind, as so many of the names have got "no longer updated" in brackets after them, and I really didn't want that fate to befall me too.

So here I am, sneaking a post in before Robin notices I had been gone a while, hehe; still not through the 'testing tunnel', but learning to live with being abnormal. After all, that consultant did say I was "unusual", so I have a reputation to maintain...

And lastly, here is a rose David painted earlier - doubtless also from his garden (am surprised he is not called Austin, quite frankly) - because while perfume sillage evaporates and real flowers die, a still life painting is a joy forever. 

'rose pink' by David Gleeson

UPDATE: The samples are here! The vials are nicely presented, in an easy-to-rip-open sealed silver pouch inside a sturdy brown envelope inside a white Jiffy bag. Oh, it is so good to be reunited with the PG...!

*My SIL's acronym for "Stash Above and Beyond Life Expectancy"

Me, myself, Instagram, and a summer of droppings and (unrelated!) broken things

"Hercules against the Hydra" ~ via Wikimedia Commons (Wolfgang Sauber)

Goodness, it is has been over a month since I wrote my last post. That doesn't surprise me though, for I have been besieged, beset, and beleaguered by a legion of problems, of which more anon (including the more amusing ones!).

But first a word on social media. I have historically been a Facebook fan through and through...well, not an unconditional one, I should add, as there is much that is wrong with Facebook, and I don't just mean the constant slew of ads for slimming hose and relaxed fit slacks. I never really took to the bitty bearpit that is Twitter, or the soothing aesthetics of Instagram, where beautifully shot images drift by like cumulus clouds. Beyond that, for a long time I had a downer on the hashtags that are such an integral part now of the virtual landscape. Their messy, spiky aspect upset me, especially when posters used a vast thicket of them, including hashtags in foreign languages. This struck me as the acme - nay, nadir! - of SEO savvy, but then I don't like pushiness and self-promotion in any guise, and struggle to embrace it myself, even though it is very much the modern way. For if you don't take active steps to climb out of the Google sandbox, you will never be heard in the chorus - some might say babble - of Internet voices.

And I don't know how it came about exactly that I started to gravitate towards Instagram after all...I may partly have been propelled into its arms by the increasingly strident tone of Facebook, the ramping up of its adverts, or the depressing snippets of news which cannot fail to catch your eye at every turn: Brexit, climate change, factory farming, pop stars dying before their time. Instagram is a languorous oasis of sensory delight by comparison, albeit peppered with the offending hashtags. I continued to wrestle with the concept of these, trying to see them merely as labels on the drawers of a cyber filing cabinet, and not as so many mini-portcullises, bordering on medieval instruments of mental torture. You can tell that I have a serious aversion to the things, bordering on hashtagophobia!

#croissantmutant

But gradually I came to enjoy picking out photos to upload onto Instagram - I steadfastly refuse to call it 'Insta', mind, for that way lies 'nom nom nom' and 'sleeps' (shudders). I even got to the point of having fun with the hashtags, occasionally running with ones that had no precedent on the Interwebs - hashtag neologisms, if you will. It surprises me that I was the first to coin #catmustbecateredfor, and there are only four other posts under #croissantmutant. That is worth checking out actually, for the one that looks like a ram in particular!

And then there are all the filters to play with, like some kind of instant colouring game(!) - a new toy for me, would you believe? - albeit I quite often end up posting pictures simply as nature intended.

If you would like to check out my page - which is embarrassingly light on perfume-related imagery, though I plan to rectify that by and by - I am flittersniffer on there. Just noticed how many 'glittersniffer's there are, but there's only one of me. What even is a 'glittersniffer'? Though didn't there used to be a perfume with gold bits in it?...hold on, at least one version of Donna Karan Gold and a JPG is also coming vaguely back to me. I am betting that they don't mean that though.

Okay, so a brief word on the summer of droppings and broken things - those would be flea and mouse droppings, not things that have been dropped, in case of any confusion. The poor birds don't last long enough in the house to leave any such calling card, plus it is ten mice for every bird 'present', to be fair. Yes, it has been a rum old time lately, with typically between four and five things going wrong every single day. Today so far there has only been 'a bad night's sleep' and 'a big fat dead mouse', so a good day really by recent standards. Though my eye eczema - complete with distinctly unfetching atopic pleats (you really don't want to know) - is back with a vengeance, and making blinking uncomfortable. (It counts towards yesterday's tally.)

"No idea how it got in, mum."

Here is a smattering - and splattering! - of recent mishaps and problems, to give you an idea of why I have been missing in action as far as blogging is concerned, though I have been inordinately busy in a firefighting / Hydra head chopping / Whack-a-mole sense. There was an equally lengthy selection in France, but one set is enough!

• Throwing up headache for two days (three times)
• Toner cartridge splatter painted a pale carpet
• Suitcase wheel mysteriously self-destructed
• Mouse droppings all round the perimeter of the living room
• Unidentified droppings on all hinges of the pantry
• Cat has ongoing flea issue
• I have itchy red lumps - praying they are mosquito bites, being more socially acceptable
• Found a bed bug casing, which I have convinced myself is historic (to avoid going mad)
• Patio has suddenly sported / sprouted? both white and green lichen!
• Phone malfunction - batteries found to be a crystalline corroded mess
• Splashed a radio with chilli con carne, now permanently stained auburn, and tacky to touch
• Bought a second hand set of drawers which will cost three times as much to fix than I paid for them (Moral of the story: buyer beware - of Photoshop!).
• Bought a pair of trainers before realising they were two different colours
• Accidentally sent my hole puncher and stapler to France
• No sooner had I repaired one silk curtain that had perished and sheared, when I noticed that the other one has gone the same way.
• Treated alleged water marks on a second hand table with oxalic acid - quite a H & S-conscious undertaking, I might add - only to discover the marks are metal - from some piece of industrial machinery that had been sitting on it. Procedure declared a resounding failure, and meanwhile have inadvertently bleached my drive (not pictured).

I will return with 'normal' blog posts though, once things have calmed down. I would like to review a new perfume from Swindon(!) for example, and more besides - but first I sense there may be a few more Hydra heads to chop and moles to whack...!

UPDATE: I have just remembered that there was another trigger for taking up with Instagram again...I managed to fix my broken blog link in the bio after several hours of deep Googling - turned out it lacked a security certificate in the format it was in, plus for some strange reason the 'www' part of the name was causing an issue, so I took that off. So there's another example of a broken thing I managed to fix!

Vital signs, and diving for Perles (de Lalique)

Ludlow, optimally fluffy and characterful

Contrary to all reasonable inferences from my latest (lengthy!) blogging hiatus, I am not dead. It would only be partially true to say that I sleepeth instead, though over the Easter weekend I did in fact spend 32 consecutive hours in bed: 14 of them awake and in the vice-like grip of a migraine, and the rest genuinely out for the count. But that is barely two days of my long absence. No, since I posted Part One of my US tour report - the rest of it will appear presently! - I have been unexpectedly working again in a three week stint of white heat activity that segued into a trip to France to sort out the house some more. A blog post may also be forthcoming about that eventful (and mercifully warmer ;) ) week.

Then on my return from France I hit the ground running in Airbnb mode, simultaneously hosting an acute medicine doctor providing cover at the hospital, and a scientific director at a well known pharmaceutical company. It occurred to me that had I been ill that night - rather than a little while after they had gone - one of them could have diagnosed my problem, while the other might have had just the pill for it! And then there was the 'ill'-timed migraine, from which I am slowly coming round, so I thought I would write a short post while the going was good.

And somewhere in all this blur of busyness, I rummaged in a perfume sample and decant drawer, and from its furthest recesses happened to pull out a small decant of Perles de Lalique, which I happily wore for five days' straight until it ran out. That degree of serial scent wearing is in itself noteworthy, and most untypical of me, but I think it has something to do with nostalgia for the early days of my perfume hobby, which it instantly conjured up. I have had that sample for eight or nine years at a guess, as part of a swap haul on MUA, judging from the handwriting - though whose handwriting in particular it might be is forever lost in the mists of time and gauzy musk.

Notes: bergamot, Bulgarian rose, iris, Bourbon pepper, Indonesian patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, cashmeran

Now I associate Perles de Lalique with Roja Dove, way back when I looked up to the man as the David Attenborough of fragrance, the go-to guru of our time, his ubiquitous authority marred only by the odd typo. I may even have thought he was a perfumer. You can tell this was a long time ago because the prices will have gone up hugely since, but I think you used to be able to have some kind of fragrance consultancy with him up in the sumptuous surroundings of the Haute Parfumerie in Harrods for a mere £50. Or maybe it was with one of his sidekicks? I simply can't recall, but it was certainly a lot cheaper back then, whoever it was with. I have just checked Tinternet and the price today for one hour with Benjamin, Roja Dove's 'Maitre de Consultation', is £150, redeemable against purchase.  Quite possibly a bargain indeed.

So anyway, I clearly remember reading interviews with several people who had had this profiling experience, all of whom had been 'prescribed' Perles de Lalique on the basis of their stated tastes and preferences. Which at the time I thought was a tad lazy, but arguably it is more a tribute to the crowd pleasing nature of the perfume than any lack of analysis on the M de C's part. I might well have come out of the process with the same result.

Perles de Lalique, for anyone whom it has managed to pass by, is a modern twist on a chypre, which I for one am glad about, as I tend to shy away from those retro, green, sappy, stabby numbers. Perles is very much a 'fluffy' rather than a 'spiky' scent (see my blog post on the distinction here), despite its chypre label. It isn't that I don't like a number of chypres on a case-by-case basis, much as I do dogs, but I also half expect them to take my eye out (as with the larger and more sabre-toothed end of the canine spectrum).

Source: eBay

Perles is soft and pillowy, with just an outline of a rose's vegetal and earth-stained stem in there somewhere, and in the far drydown I also detect shafts of something juicy that I am quite at a loss to pinpoint further. Now I have never claimed to be much of a perfume reviewer, but Ludlow the bear does a pretty good job of evoking the 'atmosphere' of Perles de Lalique simply by sitting there with the empty vial perched on his leg. He manages to exude the requisite character and approachability, teamed with optimal amounts of fluffiness.

Amusingly, in her original review of Perles de Lalique, Bois de Jasmin spoke of its 'consumptive pallor' - that's my kind of chypre, hehe - but revised her view more recently.

"Edit (May 2011): I revisited Perles de Lalique recently, and I feel that I may have been too harsh in my criticism. What seemed pale 5 years ago comes across as lush and opulent today. Is it because most new launches have gotten so attenuated? Or is it because I grew to love the modern chypre style? Either way, worth revisiting."

Similarly, in her review of the fragrance in 2016, Jessica of NST describes her rediscovery of this old love after a long interval as a 'productive mid-winter reunion'.

Which is all to say that Perles de Lalique is the sort of scent you might at first judge to be underwhelming, or merely forget about while it languishes at the back of a drawer, only to find much later that it absolutely hits the spot. For as well as catapulting me back to my early state of unalloyed wonder and excitement about perfume and its associated 'scene', it served as a comforting counterpoint during the hyperactive time I have had lately.

Though I still wouldn't drop $645 on the exquisite 'cactus' bottle of the extrait, which is now relegated to the status of a very scarce find on eBay.

As for what I intend to do with the empty vial of Perles de Lalique, that is a topic for another day, hopefully not too far away...!

Hired, tired, and working up to the wire! Please excuse the Bonkers hiatus...

Well, after eight months in which I only managed to find work for two weeks(!), proverbial bus-style two big projects with short time frames have come along at once, and of course I have agreed to both. ;)

I was telling a friend who does Airbnb about how I may well have bitten off more than I can chew: "It's a bit like you having a guest in every bedroom - including your own - plus one on the sofa, one in the bath, and one on the bench in the garden."

Then because of the hours I am now keeping I can't give any thought to perfume at the moment, even though I have all sorts of posts in the pipeline. I am not even wearing the stuff on anything like a regular basis, such is the degree of my preoccupation with the tasks in hand. And my presence on Facebook is skeleton at best, which is highly unusual for me, as any FB friends will confirm!

So I will be back, but for the moment please bear with me for the ongoing hiatus. And for saying 'bear with me', for that matter.

Truffle is not too impressed either at the minimal interaction I have had with her lately, and has taken to staging dramatic stunts, such as this one with the radio flex outside my office door, which I am pretending I haven't noticed.

Ergonomic Joy And A Bonkers Interruptus Update

There is nothing like looking at an old “to do list” to fully realise how far you have come.

“Did I pay for train ticket twice?” (what train ticket?)

“Diagnose squeak”

“Another microfibre duvet?”

"Hilary crates"

“Ask fire station re contaminated diesel”

“Say Ryan said wld give me a few pallets”

“If people don’t know whether GCSEs count, shld we tell them?”

There’s even an idea for a blog post in here:

“Eating food with your fingers”, but it may take me a while to recall the exact angle I had in mind with that.

So yes, things have moved on a lot since I wrote those lists, but as regular readers will have noticed, I am still not managing to post very much myself – or read most of my usual set of favourite perfume blogs. This is partly because I am busy addressing the hidden flaws this lovely old house keeps yielding up, and partly because I have been receiving a number of supportive emails back channel with which I am gradually catching up.

But though I am behind on so many fronts, I have a proper desk now, which is a giant leap forward, to come over all Neil Armstrong for a moment. It is technically a table, not a desk, and belonged to a friend’s grandmother – it even boasts an actual indentation shaped like an iron where she used to rest hers face down (which, as a born again lover of antique furniture, I would not recommend). If you look closely at the photo above, you can make out the mark, just down from the succulent. As you might expect, the table also features a robust work surface to – strange but true! – actually PUT MY LEGS UNDER and THINGS ON. Yes indeedy. The sense of wellbeing that descended last weekend when I first pulled up a chair AT the desk was hard to put into words, and was topped off by a rather fine sunset, to which this side of the house is pleasantly prone. Okay, so there are still a few vestigial pink splodges in one corner of the carpet where the radiator valve seeped iron oxide-pigmented sludge the other day, but in the grand scheme of things progress has been made...

So there will be more posts along in due course, including at least one other one from my recent Belgian trip – but for now I will sign off with photos of my new (freshly ironed!) Flittersniffer scarf and the perfume fridges, finally in position in the spare room. (Obviously I pulled the curtains pretty sharpish after this shot was taken!).