The box that keeps on giving...The tale of the poet, the painter, Undina and me

Now I do have a number of 'proper' review posts in the pipeline - as ever, I use the word 'proper' advisedly, ditto the term 'review' for that matter - but I am in the middle of a manic work phase, compounded by a cold of epic proportions, the ongoing sprained hand and a chipped tooth.  And my iPhone isn't feeling too clever either since I poured tea on it the other day, and only emits sound on an erratic and occasional basis.  All of which preamble is by way of saying that I can only manage short snippety posts at the moment, so please bear with me.  'Bear with me' - such a horrible overused phrase these days, and there I go using it. Too busy to bear with myself long enough to think of an alternative...!

Anyway, I did want to share a surprising and rather sweet tale that happened the other day, when I popped round to my artist friend David's house to deliver his birthday presents - to wit a bunch of drying bay leaves, five lukewarm falafel balls wrapped in tin foil (not homemade), and two Wedgwood teacups and saucers commemorating technological milestones from the last century.  The usual sort of stuff you give a bloke, basically.

As David was making us a cup of tea, I spied a box on his kitchen work surface containing a collection of tiny sea shells, nestling on some kind of foam layer.  The box looked instantly familiar...

"Wow", I exclaimed, "I had a box just like that!  A perfume blogger in California sent me some samples in it a while back.   I distinctly remember the little green cake thing."

David explained that our mutual friend Lizzie - poet, teacher, and owner of these unintentionally perfume bottle-shaped earrings - had given it to him.  She wondered if he might fancy doing a picture featuring the shells, though in painting terms it might only have been one step up from writing the Bible on a grain of rice. The mention of Lizzie instantly reminded me of how I had recycled the box sent to me by the perfume blogger in question (who was none other than Undina of Undina's Looking Glass), and used it to transport two vials of Vero Profumo Mito that I had bought for her at Bloom Perfumery in London in July.  I popped the box with the samples in through Lizzie's door in August, having finally established that she was away for much of the summer - it had previously spent a number of weeks sitting in a dish on my hall table.

Home of Undina's box - mid-July to late August

So there you have it - in four degrees of separation (Undina - me - Lizzie - David) Undina's box turns up unexpectedly in a friend's kitchen, forging a touching and piquant link between the perfume scene and my regular pals in Stafford.

And David is very eco-minded, so I have no doubt that it still has a few more miles left to travel...

On a related theme, this post from the early days of Bonkers explores the notion of well travelled sweets in perfume swap parcels, not to mention the unwanted extras that circle the globe looking for an appreciative home.

And before I left, David sportingly allowed me to recycle something else, namely a painting of a statue's feet in a cemetery in Barcelona.  I have owned that picture for nigh on 20 years - and it features in a review I wrote about Carner Barcelona D600 - but I fancied a change, and have swapped it for this one of a Persian rug and a tulip.

"Bag Of Hell" Update: Holding The Hellish And Rehoming The Ho-Hum

In my latest post about swapping on Makeupalley, I puzzled over how to offload my "bag of hell", namely the hoard of uncongenial samples I have somehow managed to accumulate over the course of 70 odd swaps.

Spurred on by the comments from readers, I made contact with the Domestic Abuse Liaison Officer at our local police station, and yesterday entrusted her with a shoebox full of scent. In the end, I baulked at giving away samples that I consider frankly horrid - these I am holding on to pending a "Bad Perfume Week" group blog event at some point in the future. You guys agreed with me that these women had probably been through enough without their nostrils suffering a fresh "assault".

So in the end I gave them every designer carded sample I could lay my hands on, of which I either had a spare/full bottle/mini, or which I decided I was probably unlikely to get round to using. Additionally, about half of the bag of hell is on its way to a new life - a mixture of designer and niche scents in mostly 1ml sample vials, which I considered "meh", but which just might be someone else's cup of tea. It turns out that they weren't really that hellish in the first place... And now the remaining, considerably smaller, bag doesn't offend me nearly as much.

A big thank you is due to those of you who encouraged me to bite the bullet and simply give my unwanted samples away - I feel much better for doing so and should have done it sooner!