'What not to wear': thoughts on stress and perfume

Vintage (too big?) Principles suit!

In three weeks' time I will have been freelance for 25 years. It's a lifestyle characterised by long periods of inactivity, often spent 'constructively waiting' for promised projects to kick off, followed by frenetic bursts of busyness. If someone had told me back in 1991 that I would have to find enough work to last me 25 years, I would have been so daunted by the prospect I might never have taken the plunge! Yes, it has only been possible to keep going this long by not thinking about the future too much, and living - or latterly more like lurching - from year to year. I suspect that the rise of SurveyMonkey has a lot to answer for in terms of queering my professional pitch, as my particular school of 'qualitative' interviewing - with its open-ended and unstructured lines of questioning - is increasingly seen as an unwieldy luxury in this short attention span age of channel zapping and Twitter.

That said, I am currently flat out on a research project of the classic kind, setting up appointments with key companies in a variety of industry sectors. It is proving challenging, however, because - just like in the run up to my last US trip in 2010 - I find myself grappling with a monster database and have ended up researching each market from scratch, and generating my own lists of companies and relevant people within them. Which all takes time, so at the end of the first week I have just one appointment in the diary to show for my efforts out of a target of 10! Not great going, but very few people pick up their phones these days, assuming the switchboard will put you through in the first place. And the question you will unfailingly get asked eventually - 'I can give you his email address?' - is the kiss of death to my kind of inquiry, the success of which relies on the combination of a pleasant telephone manner and a soupcon of surprise.

Source: pinterest

And by mid-afternoon on Friday I realised that I had been so consumed by the difficult task in hand that I hadn't applied perfume all week, an omission that is completely without precedent. Even on my Californian project, I remembered to wear some before I went to bed:

"I have been so preoccupied and mithered this week that I have sometimes forgotten to apply perfume till late in the day - or even late in the Americans' day."

There seems to have been a crisis on the food shopping front, mind:

"...it is getting to the point where food parcels would not go amiss. Mr Bonkers has eaten all the pizzas in the freezer and is just starting on the boxes."

I had food in the house at least, but my fragrance failings troubled me no end. So I promptly dabbed on a bit of the nearest vial that came to hand, astonished that I could have been distracted like this on such a sustained basis.

Truffle, keenly aware that I could do with 'friends in high places'

As it happens, I have touched on the subject of when a person might not feel like wearing perfume in a couple of other posts on Bonkers, notably this one, where I cite the instances of illness, and the death of - or an argument with - a loved one. I also lobbed in a nuclear holocaust for good measure - on a purely hypothetical basis it must be hoped - notwithstanding all the Cold War-style posturing going on in Korea at the moment.

"I think if there was a nuclear holocaust I might also forgo perfume. I might even not get washed."

And I know there is often talk on the blogs of what perfumes you turn to to comfort and soothe in times of stress, but this week proves that sometimes you are in such a hyper state that any perfume risks being jarring and 'too much' - even if I had remembered I'd forgotten to put it on!

Source: pfitblog

Have you ever NOT worn perfume for 4-5 days on the trot because the balance of your mind was disturbed?

I would be interested to hear your scentless experiences!


PS All the best to Nick Gilbert, all-round fragrance guru and good egg, who launched his own freelance venture this week. He is nearly 31, which coincidentally is the age I was when I went solo!

When It Is Senseless To Be Scentless

Back in January I was feeling very rough with a suite of ear, nose and throat complaints, and wrote a post about the occasions when I might be disinclined to wear perfume: illness, death of a relative, domestic strife etc. I can now add another one to the list - being horribly sidetracked.

For yesterday I had all manner of useful things planned: a bit of weeding, the interment of some dead succulents, a cycle ride over to Mr Bonkers' mother, maybe even a major grocery shop.

But none of these things occurred. Instead I remained at the computer most of the day, editing a non-fiction book that I have uploaded on to the Authonomy website, which is a sort of self-adjudicating slush pile administered (in a distinctly hands off fashion) by the publishing house Harper Collins. There are 8000 books on there, and their authors read and critique one another's works and the most popular are supposed to rise to the top in accordance with a cunning algorhythm. At the end of month, Harper Collins selects the top five books for review and decides whether or not they are worthy of a publishing deal. None has been awarded in the time I have been involved with the site (four months), I suspect because the books which are the most actively promoted by their authors tend to rise fastest. Which is not to say they have no merit, but they are not necessarily the best of the bunch.

Anyway, what this means is that to avoid plummeting like a stone in the rankings, you have to put in a good few hours every day reading other authors' works and commenting on them. I don't have that kind of time, though there was one chap who spent so long on Authonomy every day that he ended up in hospital with an embolism. That didn't help his ranking, I can tell you! Like him, I have done a fair bit of plummeting lately and yesterday I was piqued by a slightly snippy comment from another author, prompting me to disappear most of yesterday down a black hole of editing and re-editing. I was still unwashed and in my dressing down at 9.30pm - and crucially, SCENTLESS! Mr Bonkers quipped that the house was the better for it, but to me it was the lack of scent rather than the failure to wash or dress that constituted the most flagrant sign of self-neglect.

Moreover, I cannot help but wonder whether this dysfunctional day (on all other fronts but my book project) may have prompted a bizarre dream last night.

In this dream someone's mother had just died (no one I knew) and a bunch of other people (whom I didn't know either) were applying a great deal of pressure on me to construct an enormous wreath for this lady out of daffodils. Not only was it to be huge, but in the shape of a sou'wester, owing to some connection the deceased had with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. I cried, I stamped my foot, and protested tearily that I had no experience with flower arranging on this scale - nothing really beyond plonking a bunch of carnations in a vase, indeed. And though I had owned a Peter Storm mac as a child, I had only the fuzziest of ideas of how a sou'wester was constructed, let alone how to replicate one in daffodils.

Much has been written about perfume as "therapy", as a mood enhancer, a confidence booster and so on, but I think this story clearly demonstrates a fundamental link between perfume and mental health...