The Black Narcissus

It is quite weird revisiting a Former Signature Perfume that you haven’t worn for thirty years.

And Elephant – in its original formulation, intensely, skin-burningly pungent – see my original review – by the inimitable Dominique Ropion – that sickly, addictive vanilla mess – and the one I wore out a couple of Fridays ago – is (was?) a genuinely Weird Perfume. Utterly original. Synthetic to the hilt. Brain-punchingly strong. But also natural (that cardamon, that licorice…..); sexy; strange……..it changed my life.

The vanilla note the next day is divine. Perfection. Couched with enough patchouli and amber and powderiness to drift in the air if it miraculously happens to have delicately raced your clothes. And the beginning………….kin’ell where to start; the cloves, the cumin, the ylang…..they chose the right animal. The sillage is elephantine in its proportions; disgusting, if also exciting in many ways, but as I realized on the Night In Question, where I re-trampled my first months in Japan by revisiting a place I lived then with an old friend who also lived in the same monstrous tower block, the middle, chlorinated, horribly plasticky centre of the perfume – often an issue with Kenzo fragrances, that thrilling plasticity – was so awful that I am not sure I can ever fully go there again (admittedly, it may have turned, but I always remember it actually being like that right from the beginning; a friend of mine bought the perfume based on how it smelled on me in 1997 or so (I always planned it carefully and in particular conditions to bring out the best of the hooves and snout) – but was so appalled when he sprayed it on unawares it practically brought on a panic attack. He ran screaming to the nearest hose.

Ah yes; Peter. He was the first one who wore a ‘female’ perfume convincingly – Shalimar – and made me swoon with all the possibilities. The next thing you knew I was at some airport or other at Duty Free and, fascinated by the ludicrosity of a perfume called Elephant with a metal elephant as the cap and something smelling that spicy and acute – I had bought the thing, undeterred, and brought it back to Japan.

The reactions I got were intense. I couldn’t quite get over it. I was a bit like Grenouille in Patrick Suskind – patrons in bars wanting to feast on my neck. Ok, maybe I exaggerate a little here (I don’t- it was actually like that), but suffice it to say, I rocked this perfume and bust the gender hymen like the finest African Grey.

But it’s like Kouros; Obsession; Givenchy Pi; JPg Le Male; perfumes you wore to death but which wore you and thus wore out. If you have geek tendencies towards Memory Libraries like me, still sometimes wanting to ignite the candle of the snuffed out forever then you might find a collectible and smell it every once in a while, but like Lenny Kravitz, it ain’t over til its over. And Elephant was definitely over for me – forever. Until last month.

*

Me and M- who moved back here five years after many years in other countries – decided on the spontaneous moment, one Friday, as there was nothing at the cinema that we wanted to see, to go back to a residential building in the Yokohama suburb of Hodogaya that we both lived in – she quite happily – for two and a half years with some very nice housemates that she got on well with – and I – somewhat more neurotically – for six weeks with a bunch of random strangers I could barely talk to – until I fortunately fled to Kamakura – back in the winter of 1996.

*

I hated it.

The extent surprised me. I expected at least a bit of kaleidoscopic ‘trip down memory lane’- but no….for me it was like being plunged back into a black lake. Horrible. But I should have realized that it is very obvious your memory colour of any time in your life affects everything in your later perception: I have have fantastic memories of random chunks of my allotted time in life- a Leamington Spa piano competition in 1984; family holiday in Greece in the late eighties; the summer of 93 after graduating and living with d; making a drag horror film with a wonderful collective of people in 2016 – the list could go on; we had a fantastic weekend just three days ago when Burning Bush made something of a glorious comeback on the piano in front of an audience- and in the house, to boot, for the first time- but if one period in question in your life was shit; depressing, then I think that we should be honest in admitting that it is probably staying that deep brown colour of misery forever.

At that particular point in time, in 1996, the year I ‘escaped’ London and my life with d and randomly flew to Japan, I would say it was probably my life’s actual lowpoint (mmm….yes, all this is coming out in my researching/ writing my ‘cultural memoir’ – painful, in fact, but I had to go back to the source, hadn’t been there for decades), and the sheer ugliness of the sterile, treeless environment of that fume-filled suburbia I was put in, those built up functional living spaces just made me asphyxiate- it really isn’t worth it, business people, just to have a more comfortable commute! – as well as living with three random ‘room mates’ as a 26 year old Failed Londoner in assigned company lodgings unable to sleep – it all came back to me with a force of anti-nostalgia I really wasn’t expecting. The Darkness got to me ;;M and I couldn’t gel, trapped in our own memory bubbles – I was taking over the experience with my negativity and overriding her more positive recollections but I just couldn’t help it – it was practically a ‘Nam flashback for me – just that instead of Wagner on the soundtrack, The Ride Of The Valkyries – it was the unremitting stench of Jungle L’élephant.

*

Yes, Elephant wasn’t really helping.

Well, maybe it was. I don’t know. I was certainly fascinated by the time warp of wearing it, how it morphed, how we trudged to the shithole we once lived in as it plodded along and we held on desperately to its tufty tail. But it jarred with my current self. This was not me any more – it was another person; a younger me masquerading in an older body – and I felt unnerved; not quite right. By the time we met at the station after my journey from the divine Kamakura (omg the difference!) it had thankfully calmed quite a lot at least; prior to that I had been seriously considering finding a place with hot water and soap I could wash it off as it stank and I was genuinely embarrassed that people around me might have thought I actually wanted to smell this way. Forty five minutes after having a pachydermic meltdown on the Yokosuka Line thinking no no no get it off me! get this sugar slick from hell off me! it had virtually settled into the odour I think I remember it being, and M – smelling the back of my hand and neck and remembering it very fondly, was delighted (or was she just being polite?) that I had thought to put it on as a perfumed adjunct. For her, Elephant is how she remembers me and her at the time we first met when we were fresh-faced newbies in Yokohama; I would practically bathe in it in the school we worked in together (poor students in their tiny booths!) but more specifically, there was the time I visited her on the maternity ward a few years later in Oxfordshire three or four days after giving birth and I apparently filled up the entire space to the irritation/ amusement of many of the midwives – who were not used to a giant human licorice allsort thundering into their babe-sensitive space. I was mortified once I realized my over-estent- but for some reason, M loved the hilarity of the whole situation and remembers it with great affection – – how it brought some fun and sweetness into the zone and scented the room and her daughter- and captured, olfactively, my living reality as an absolute blunderbuss.

I don’t, in truth, think the perfume has particularly changed since then. And as I said, it did smell incredible the next morning – the best vanilla ever. Angelic vanilla dust. Gorgeous. I just can’t do that middle section again though,- that nasty, nasty, chlorine at the heart that is hideous. (But any other fellow Elephanters, who love this curious perfume, please do feel free to add your own take on the scenario). And bizarrely, though they could hardly be more different, I have found in the time since that the final stages of Puredistance’s famously green fresh and floral Antonia extrait de parfum- in its vanilla and vetiver thickness, more ambery and gourmand, even spicy, than is realized by most perfumisti ,on me, turns out quite similar, and is currently filling the giant shoes of the unwearable Kenzo in a far more appropriate fashion that goes better with Neil Chapman, Version March 2026. .I am getting that chalky, rich and sultry effect without having to wade in elephant sized wellington boots through swimming pools of caraway and mango and risking death to get to the finish. Yes, you can trumpet all you like about how good this perfume is – and its fans understandably still go nuts over it, the ultimate chai latte, the best winter spice ever, etc etc etc etc and they are right. It is kind of amazing, which is why I bought it. But for me personally, I can say with some certainty that, for now at least, this zoo is closed.

I had never before been in a Balenciaga.

Why would I?

For a start, the brand / house / cultural phenomenon gives my brain mixed messages. Growing up, there were dusty old Balenciaga perfumes in my nan’s bathroom that she never used – probably she got them from the duty free on the Costa Del Sol along with the nylon flamenco dancers and Pepe the donkey who I adored – and they just lay there getting musty. I would smell them; Rumba and Ho Hang – ho hum I would think as a child, even if later I did come to really like the Grace Jones tuberose coconut of Michelle and the sly rose of Cialenga (apologies to all the Prelude and Quadrille lovers; sorry, I just never loved them as much as you).

Yes, so to me, the name and image of Balenciaga, in its clunky thick overwritten labels and marinating marinades decaying among old jagged lemon soaps was just a bit naff – most children and teenagers don’t fashion fantasize over their grandparents’ choices – and I was no different. Now, of course, it is another matter; Denma, the previous designer who turned the house into a whirlwind of must-have coolness for young kids after their hoodies and ridiculous sneakers and towels for the gym and backpacks – transformed ‘la maison’ for a while there into dollar-whipping powerhouse; B was all the rage in Yokohama NeWoman and you would see delighted young kids in their early twenties who had saved up for one of the luxurious rip-offs – it’s just for me I totally associate it all with assholes like Kanye West with a bag over his head at the Met Gala and the like – mere ashes in the wind.

*

Still, wandering one day, tout seul as usual in recent times trying to find a way to pass the time, and having done a bit of nose business upstairs at Nose Yokohama, potential reviews I could write entering, and then leaving through my right ear, I saw that the Balenciaga concession on the ground fllor had nobody in it except for a couple of languishing sales staff, and that there was a whole range of perfumes stood there that I had never heard of or smelled of before – and that that situation should be immediately rectified.

*

As an ‘ex-pat’ I suppose you never really stop comparing. You can’t help putting things side by side from your original culture and judging them to how they are done in ‘the other place’. Food, for instance: I vastly prefer restaurants here, for their incredible quality, value, and no-nonsense – no tipping, no need to flirt with the waiting staff and come up with groovy repartee – keep those false eyelashes out of my dinner, b****! – for me the dining experience at home can be rather arduous. A portion of chips in newspaper I can just take out and walk along with, yes; but don’t get me caught up in no ‘hand-prepared, pan-seared..’ bullshit – I like my food excellent and simple with no palaver. Attentive staff, who deliver what they are supposed to, but otherwise fade into the wallpaper or the kitchen. I am not there to make friends.

Perfume shopping, though, however, but indeed. There is no comparison. I have heard some lovely and envy inducing stories recently from friends having a field day at London Liberty, where you do in fact have the liberty of actually spraying on the perfumes as you see fit – not as tight poled as a sphyx’s sphincter – as it unfortunately usually is in Japan.

Perfume should be Baudelarian; full of sensuality and abandonment, else what the hell is the point? Life can be shite – we know that – and gorgeous potions can take us away from all that for a few moments and much longer, a lifetime even – if a scent sinks into you and you fall in love with it – but – and does anyone have a contention with the following statement – you do, actually need to try the fucker on your skin.

Nose Shop were perfectly ok upstairs; you are not officially allowed to just whoosh willy-nilly (‘please ask the staff if you would like to try one of the fragrances’ – er yes, ok, then) but what is great there is that, up to a point, you can ask to try a fair few of their interesting very contemporary collections, and the assistant will spray a decent amount on a paper card, write down its name, and then insert the card into a little clear vinyl envelope meaning that it is not going to contaminate your clothing or your personage and you can take it out again at leisure – very useful in fact. Yes, thinking about it actually, this is a Japanese custom that British perfumeries might want to take on, instead of the mudheap of confused paper testing strips that eat the atmosphere of your average London niche P boutique. Here you get to take a paper card away – a whole selection of them – and compare it over days without ruining your inner coat pocket with chemical warfare.

At least in such places – what I would call real perfumeries – the assistants do kneau that the customers are there to imbibe. To sniff. To inhale. To want to cannibalize their own skin if the scent is that good- and this requires the physical movement of bottle to body; you can’t just stand their staring at the bottles, through glass, stupidly, as though they were the Crown Jewels.

*

I don’t think it was appearance; I wasn’t too much of a hobo that day. I looked fine; I have a nifty black cashmere coat and some very nice scarves – I will never be a fashionista – and very much out of choice, mein liebling, that never interested me – and I am no d – goodness you should see the closets he has built up over the years – but neither am I Stig Of The Trump – I can pull it off. I looked fine. So l’image narcissisien was not the issue. Plus I do know the odd this and that about scent, even if I am not fully at the front of the conveyor belt. . Plus I am a potential paying customer. Plus whatever – just do your fucking job.

*

Sadly, you will be disappointed perhaps that this post is not going to be one of those Neil Classics like the post about the Martin Margielas and the c*** that served me at Hankyu Men’s in Tokyo – one of the most passive aggresive department stores with the least testosterone in the air in the world; that was me at my most delectably vicious – and every word was merited. I was ready to ice pick back at everyone just like Sharon Stone.

No – this was not quite as suicidally gelid as that. No. B was not bad service – it was just…….lame.

From what I could gather from the situation, what you are supposed to do in Balenciaga as a J consumer in this situation in which you are supposed to venerate and genuflect within your body in absolute silence and wonder at the imported goods before you is just stand in front of the ten arranged perfumes – some of which have appallingly dumb names such as Twenty Four Seven, No Comment, and To Be Confirmed- our Spanish originator must surely be spinning at 250 bpm in his cemetery at the banality of vision here, even if the labels do look quite nice on this new series of bouteilles; after all, these were what drew me in- no, what you are supposed to apparently do is just stand there like a frightened llama in front of the selection, blink dumbly begging for understanding,, and then the assistant, who has presumably at the headquarters training somewhere or other up in Tokyo gemmed up on the notes and the inspirations in his or her manual under the till; will guide you to what you might potentially like, spraying a tiny amount on the ‘Balenciaga’ paper card built especially for the purpose, which you will then waft your hand over to try and bring its scent molecules to your nasal cilia, but not vulgarly inhale like those brutes across the ocean who just dig they’s noses in like pigs trammelling for truffes.

Immediately rebuffing such wordless boomerangs, my own words were, simply, ‘I want to smell them all’.

The man didn’t quite know what to do. He wasn’t rude; he just slightly malfunctioned, like an oculus-melting android in a Steven Spielberg movie. I explained, in Japanese, that I wanted to have each perfume sprayed on a card at least if I wasn’t allowed to wear it on my body, and that I wanted them to be put in a plastic envelope – just as been previously achieved upstairs.

However, the shop didn’t have the provision of those little plastic bags to encase your precious niche. Instead, there were posh little grey envelopes with, you guessed it, Balenciaga written on them – but you were only allowed one – which I suppose you are supposed to fetishize in some way – stare at it by your bedside, spiritually mate with it, or try to immediately sell on Rakuten or eBay to dopes who do collect such crap, but I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted. to. smell. them.

*

He was blockading my way. No, you can’t smell all of them. You have to choose one. Really? Oh. Ok then, let me go with…er, this one I suppose. I have already forgotten which one it was – Getaria? But it had fresh Angel vibes – no gracias, senorita. I went to the more viscous looking darker elixirs on the right – uuu Incense Profumum might be nice; I do love frankincense; and I did like this one; the aldehydes in my nose might have been a carry over from the Le Dix I also smelled just before it (good; a pretty convincing re-working of a morbidly melancholy violet musk that is exquisite in its way but also perhaps too much of Another Age; purists will disagree, and the new white musk finish could be considered a violation/ a vulgarity/ an abomination etc etc but to me this was quite a convincing touch up- the talc-covered corpse has been successfully resurrected for a new era); Incense Profumum also gave me a slight consumerist boner.

The incense in it was nice; mingly; tingly; real. Frankincense and balsams – a bit tense, perhaps, like the foolish penguin that was ‘serving’ me; not especially original but I would wear it and place it in with my other fumes with a definite amount of pleasure. Cristobal, though intriguing up to a point, was a bit too oud-treacly and dense – but clearly high quality (at an eye-boggling¥47,000 before tax I should certainly hope so – you can rent an apartment here in certain places here for that, even though it doesn’t look like much in luxe terms when converted to pounds or dollars) – and to me not really in keeping with the original Balenciaga image – but then again as I said earlier on, what is that now anyway? Is Elsa Schiaparelli still harking after the lobster? Most fashion houses have little coherence in their aesthetic legacies – Gucci, for example, where Denma has gone to try and save Milanese royalty after the disastrous Alessandro Michele departure a few years ago (how callous, and so very rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship are the victimy fashionistas – and are you surprised?) is also all over the place image wise and has no continuity really : it is all just vile, greedy behemoths – but we knew that already.

*

I am also, obviously, a total hypocrite (I think the vast majority of us are). And if we can get back to the UK in the summer – the Great Ochre Blancmange having trashed so many lives with its gammy, boot-polish stained toddler fists crashing down on whole continents that the rest of the world just has to pick up the shards and hope they can afford to get on a plane again, if they even get to live another day – if I do, in the grander scheme of things I do have to say I really fancy some Actual Perfume Shopping. Where the assistants Believe In Inhalation. Where they coat your skin in pungent oil slicks you are immediately desperate to wash off, but where it is at least in the original spirit of Egyptian, Roman, Arab perfume cultures where the prime drive for their production is simply for spiritual, aesthetic, sensual, erotic pleasure : I have had delightful experiences in department stores in Birmingham in the past, with ultra friendly staff who sprayed their wares on you as though they were watering their gardens; of course they were knackered standing up all day in fine hoserie under bright lights -and Christ, all that makeup – but at least, also, there is none of this tight-assed, froze-lipped crapola where the perfumes sit oddly, morosely wondering why no one is spraying them properly; bored and dejected.

They are there because they know they exist to please: to go on the skin, delight – to work up a rumba.

There are over a hundred Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Kamakura – still so many I have never been to.

With the savagery being perpetrated in the Middle East – soul-tearingly awful and so upsetting – I suddenly felt like a moment of quiet peace and reflection after briefly meeting d for coffee on his lunch break ( it has been such a lonely year ! ) and then cycling off to the junk shop to buy some cheap and colourful rubbish – and a bottle of Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea – which is nicer than I remember.

Yes I know, all this random flotsam we keep accruing is very meaningless in the deep and horrible scheme of things…. I can hardly muster up rage in the way I used to because part of my soul has been incinerated in several ways ( I now have a kind of void of sadness in the place my extreme anger used to be and my writing has possibly suffered as a result, forgive me …..but that man…. my god… )

Still, we go on. Even with wincing limbs and all our other troubles : to set foot in a peaceful place – today Anyoin temple for the first time, was a quiet breath of serenity.

This too shall pass.

They were past their best in the main, dried out, some even a little crispy, but many of the peonies at the February exhibition of botan at the Hachimangu shrine in Kamakura were still fritillatedly resplendent.

I do like peonies – both in luxuriantly madame frou appearance and bittersweet odour (though as a stridently artificial note in perfume it is generally hideous ) – and they are probably d’s favourite flowers.

I have good memories of them growing up when some really choice fists of puce peony would unfurl fragrantly on warm early summer evenings, wood pigeons cooing in the rafters of Dovehouse Farm; to me they represent an ineffable resting elegance and an integral part of my mum’s carefully – but ramblingly – curated back garden where I would lounge about reading fairy stories or dreaming under laburnum.

This year – a tough year ! (I have not gone into so much, and probably should) has still been good in terms of relationships : I have a blossoming relationship with a Japanese lady in our neighborhood who has helped me in so many ways I feel very indebted ( a lost wallet here, facilitating a medical referral there..) : what could I possibly do to return the favour?

‘Can you make me an English garden?’

So there you have it. We have been assembling rosemary, lavender, lupins, Christmas roses, anemones and hyacinths : I have suggested peonies as well – she was surprised, as they are such classically popular Japanese flowers- but wouldn’t you say they are part of the Classic English garden? I would say hollyhocks, foxgloves… irises? She buys the plants and we go round and plant them (well, I stand there with my stick and help him choose the best position)- and slowly the garden is taking shape.

What are the quintessentials ?

Walking behind some Europeans in Kamakura yesterday I was dismayed by the brain-bashing stench of the perfume a young ish man strolling ahead of me had unleashed into our rarified midst. It was…. disgusting. ‘Beast Mode’. Nullifying. A vulgarian boulder blocking up the airwaves.

In Japan, a country that favours olfactory subtlety, such ‘perfumes’ – can we really call them this ? – only pollute the oxygen. Even from several paces away I felt assaulted, as though clubbed by an ox: how could anyone come into physical proximity with such a pollutant-contaminated skin interface?

The chemists that gave us Baccarat Rouge and its infinite variants that slough the breeze like brainless pink godzillas burning our cilia with singed saffron caramels, monsterized jasmins and synthetic oudhs – do they not eventually wish they could retract them from our collective consciousnesses and take us back to a purer air ? All the inescapable, evil ‘ambers’ that troll our minds like a brain bludgeoning life sentence?

The Kamakura perfume yesterday – vile though it was – was nothing in comparison to what I smelled in a Shinjuku hotel room a couple of weeks ago, however – wow ! It was the most shocking, indeed scandalous ! reaction I have ever had to a perfume.

Admittedly, we were overperfumed ourselves. Our friend from Shanghai had very generous it booked a luxury weekend at a Hyatt and we naughtily stayed over – crowding in to her room before hitting the nightlife afterwards (still only in semi recovered mode I couldn’t, alas, take part in the dancing but went out for the first chapter ): she doused in contemporary Fahrenheit; d in Electimuss Puritas – a pink pepper vanilla frankincense – Yukiro in Paloma Picasso, and me in my somewhat smothering ‘Guerlain Winter Special’ – vintage Shalimar, Vol De Nuit and Heritage applied liberally six hours in advance – so yes, it was already too much, and quite old school I suppose- omg, there may have been some naturally sourced aroma materials ! only making any twenty first century heightened aromachemicals all the more noxious in cruel juxtaposition,

but Jesus Christ, when Tony walked in from his suite upstairs and entered our own clouds of excessive perfumanity I had the intensest inner response to a ‘fragrance’ ever in my life.

Reader, I was paralyzed.

Paralyzed! I couldn’t move or speak. A sudden plunge into brief, disorientating insanity.

Thinking at first it was just my usual jolt of initial sociophobia when meeting new individuals, I tried to open my mouth, but the overwhelming flattening of my nervous system by whatever monstrosity he had just obviously sprayed on a few moments before entering our space left me awestruck : physically speechless.

Karen kept looking at me as if to say when are you going to start communicating, but the toxic miasma of searing petrochemicals he had ruined himself with was so severe it took me about ten minutes to gather myself. Is this what nerve gas feels like ? A biohazardous attack, inhuman and system shredding ?

Eventually, of course, I pulled myself together, still marvelling at the power of his pungency and the fact he was supposedly on the pull in the gay zone later that evening ( surely only the fully anosmic could approach another person, no matter how physically attractive, in these circumstances), and though it was hypocritical, for your sake, I had to eventually ask him, if he didn’t mind, what the ‘interesting’ perfume he was wearing was called.

‘It’s the new Scandal by Jean Paul Gaultier’.

‘Usually I wear Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille’ he told me – and oh god, I wish you had was my inner reply

..’ but I got a sample of this at Shanghai airport as I thought it was quite nice..’

!!!!

Admittedly, it did later tone down to just a regular, irritating banality rather than an attack by a bioweapon designed to induce crippling neuropathy – but man, this was a serious nadir in modern fragrance for me : damaging to the spirit and physically utterly intolerable. Obviously this post is hyperbolic beyond endurance – so do take it with your own personal grain of salt – but still, in all honesty, like the proliferation of nuclear missiles currently mushrooming globally – for the sake of humanity – can these ingredients honestly be safe for our bodies ? I really do wish I could rid the entire world of this poisonous shit.

Tiffany. Back in the charts with I Think We’re Alone Now almost forty years after the fact because of Stranger Things. Tiffany Trump. Breakfast At. It could not possibly be more American.

And it was an American girl I first smelled this perfume on almost three decades ago, just another teacher passing through — but I remember that each time we met her she smelled sublime.

Blonde, not petite, this perfume beamed through her cotton and blue jean pores and was impossibly alluring. We would spend all night sniffing her: sniffing Tiffany, bees to a flame.

Yes, it was one of those orchestral white florals – orange blossom / tuberose / sandalwood / vanilla typical of the day, dripping with unctuous femininity – think Sung, Jardins De Bagatelle, Fleurs De Rocaille, Romeo Gigli, then Red Door and Tendre Poison, Ananya and Giò and, more than anything, the luscious Cartier Panthère (as it used to be, which smelled so incredible on a girl at university called Anoushka that I practically hallucinated) – but though some might find this full sensurround off the shoulder too performatively sexy, I am personally rather partial to a nectarous scent siren like this one every once in a while (just a dip in the toe of vulgarity without going the whole hog). This vintage edition of Tiffany – created by Patrick Demachy, he of a million Diors and classics like my beloved Ungaro Pour L’Homme, treads the sensuous line between trash and class rather brilliantly.

There is a smoothness to Tiffany that makes it non pareil. There are no rough edges – all emerges in one honeyed glimmer. Mandarin, orange flower, rose taif and American muguet, the freshness of blackcurrant honing down to a more anchored – but subtle – this is not Giorgio of Beverly Hills – vetiver and sandalwood, radiantly soft and skin kissing amber.

The original pre-reformulation version of Tiffany is now apparently legendary – you realize the ardor the perfume generates when you go on Fragrantica – and now goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay. I rescued this particular bottle from an old iron drawer at a junk yard on Saturday afternoon for five hundred yen, about 2 pounds fifty. Nostalgic for the Theresa memories – she lit up karaoke with this perfume, I knew I had to have it for old time’s sake; polished off its mottles and inserted it immediately into the collection.

Naturally it doesn’t suit me – though Burning Bush might consider it on a hot Tokyo night out in May. But no – this needs a particular person, a particular bombshell with the right natural luminosity to fully do it justice. And if such a person does come over to the house and it fits like a glass slipper, then I may fancifully bestow a decanted vial or two in their direction. Otherwise, this perfume is staying put. I like simply inhaling it from the cap – a fortifying glamour of 80’s Americana and an absolute classic of its genre.

So wafty and deep

I have been eyeing this one for a while. A leaky Jean Patou Mille, whose rose patchouli vapours long infiltrated the Kamakura antiques shop in which it was ensconced.

I finally snapped it up yesterday, transferring its trail of supercilious franco-reverie to our house.

Placing it in a prime position in the most treasured vintages on the dresser by my bed, I found it hard to sleep last night : this old parfum, macerating in itself for decades is so intensely potent it affected me at various levels of (sub) consciousness, almost approaching brain nausea.

Do you know 1000? (pronounced ”Mille?’)I would love to hear the opinions of aficionados, those sworn to the enigmatic witchery of the vintage only (I also have an edt and an edp, both effective) though the sly, oiled luminescence of the serpentine extract really does take some beating.

Mordantly, effortlessly elegant, 1000 is quite a peculiar perfume – making its statements but also somehow unexpressed : a classical floral chypre centered on violets and osmanthus with herbaceous green edges; delicately animalic, sandal-musked base, and a rich, dark red geranium-stained , Joy-echoing rose that inhabits the heart.

At the same time, there is also an explicit sensuality hidden within the implicit good taste of this Patou : the 1000 of the name referring to either the alleged one thousand attempts perfumer Jean Kerleo made to attain perfection, or, if you watch the old advert, the number of times…

If you can get your hands on a good bottle, 1000 is a perfume with a fascinating evolution. The particular bottle I bought yesterday – for twenty five pounds, a reasonable deal, has possibly lost some of the strange green beauty of the jade / red smaller 7ml iteration, in which the slow slide from green plants to osmanthus, apricot and lucid violet, with whispers of papery muguet slowly descends to a more subtly pheromonal, chypric leather base.

But this bottle also has an added richness, containing the very essence of Patou 1000. And though I had to move it to another room – just too distracting for sleep – what would I be dreaming of ?- its inspired emanations -will have to rise up into my writing room instead, taunting the surrounding greenery.

D and I don’t really have any hardfast traditions at Christmas and New Year : each December is different.

We don’t do gift giving either – birthdays are our big splurge – but on occasion it is nice to spontaneously buy presents for each other – as is what happened on December 25th.

We were up in Tokyo for our first ever British Pub Christmas lunch with a ragbaggle of friends who would otherwise have been by themselves – and in the morning I suddenly had the idea of going to a lovely Japanese owned British antique shop that is sometimes open nearby (a bit coals to Newcastle, I know – but there was something charming about getting him a 70’s Norwich Cathedral bone china mug in the middle of Tokyo when he is actually from there, and that magpie can never resist jewellery : two chunky rings were snapped up with relish from my end of the bargain), while I just ‘settled’ for three ravishing bottles of vintage French perfume that blew the barn off my roof):

Crêpe de Chine?

Good lord is that Crêpe de Chine ?!

Oh my god look at those original white Bakelite caps ?

wow wow wow, omg.

I was gagging.

And Ma Griffe ? A full bottle when my stocks of the vintage edt and parfum are now quite low?

Not Ma Griffe? !!

MAIS ALORS QU’EST-CE-QUE C’EST?

You realize the frothiness of your bicarbonate soda inner geek levels when you find yourself so extraordinarily excited, simply by seeing some green and white elegant stripes on an old perfume box- that then you realize weren’t even what you thought they were was but something else entirely – Robe D’Un Soir – which I had not even heard of, to my shame – you are practically panting and palpitating, even – sorry for this part! – when the actual smells of the perfumes themselves, though intact olfactively, don’t, for me personally, quite reach the same aesthetic heights. The joy of the avid collector, however, remains undiminished.

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Crêpe De Chine is the kind of legendary perfume only read about in classic perfume histories – I have actually written about it before in the context of a wonderful afternoon I once had down the hill near Kenchōji temple when a pair of elderly sisters invited us for dinner and the wilder of the two rushed off to get her beloved bottle of the Millot perfume she has had since she was a young girl. At that time, though I was intrigued by the scent, my pleasure came more from the joy that smelling the scent gave the younger of the two sisters: I couldn’t quite ‘read’ the perfume then, and I can’t now either. It smells mossy, manly, musty – androgynously rich and beckoning, but lacking that factor. When Karen came to stay at our house over the new year she agreed: she loves Mitsouko, but couldn’t wear this – just a brief step too far perhaps into the realm of the dust-laden Ms Havershams (she also put the idea into my head that the bottles look a bit like pine disinfectants, which de-accentuated their visual brilliance for a few moments when I couldn’t help but agree with her- yet they fit so beautifully in the hand and give me intense visual satisfaction every time I glance at them in my writing room where plants and green predominate that I don’t mind).

Robe D’Un Soir, apparently part of a whole quartet of Carven perfumes in different variations of the classic green and white patterns and featuring Vert Et Blanc, Chasse Gardée as well as by far the most well known, Ma Griffe – a perfume I love and wear for its intense, lemon-leaf freshness and softness – is a lilting, silken number, a little like a slighter greener, more white floral No 5 with a dreamy top note of lys blanc that can apparently be seen on the dresser in Belle De Jour starring Catherine Deneuve – but unlike Griffe, which on my skin softens down to a beautifully soapish, chypric vetiver, is slightly sordidly musky and unfresh. I think you had to be there, perhaps, to be in the cultural context, in the presence of a particular woman of that time in her particular bedroom before her mirror in that particular evening gown or dress to fully indulge in this Carven; it is rather lovely, despite its not having turned, this bottle must be fifty years old at least, but I am not entirely ravished.. Still, I love having it; the fonts alone are enough to thrill me, and the mere knowledge that I had these beauties wrapped with typical Japanese origami flair in old newspaper on my person during the at times slightly nerve-wracking Christmas pub experience – I always worry about people who are meeting each other for the first time getting along – provided an added bulk of inner jubilation.

A question to you, though?

I have not seen the sisters in quite a while now (though I did think I possibly spotted the Crêpe de Chine wearer one day in the environs of where we visited their house when I rode by; she has a very distinctive facial expression, but it has been years, and I don’t know if they are even alive….)

Part of me wants to just go down there, climb the steps and knock on the door with the smaller bottle of Crêpe De chine, ring on the doorbell and give it to her as a present : another is quite happy to territorially keep it right where it is, in front of my eyes even as I type this out……..

But if she loves the scent so much, although there is no guarantee that she would love the ‘eau de..’ variant as much as the precious extrait she was clutching that wonderful evening like a loon, I would be delighted to had it over; when you love a perfume to that extent, it can truly be a timeline to another universe.

Would she even recognize me, though?

It’s been twenty years….Will there be frightened calls to the local police box (‘There’s a weird foreign man in front of me wielding bottles of Millot Crepe De Chine… come quickly please’).

So yes. A question. Should I go and give it to her in the spirit of nostalgia, spontaneity: or should the perfume, like the somewhat unrelatable scent that it emanates, be left in the distant past?

What a joke.

I did have to laugh.

In the midst of Greenlandic – as well as various other forms of despair, the other bright, sunny winter’s day – I found myself inadvertently wearing Kenzo’s cheerily envisioned Le Monde Est Beau.

The charming plastic mounded bottle, like a pebble mounted with ikebana flowers, was gifted to me via d by Mistress Maya, a doyenne of the Tokyo latex scene, who brought it from her parents’ house in the country after her mother died and gave it to d to give to me as a cheer-up: I have long enjoyed seeing it there on the white table next to my writing desk along with the rare glass aphid iteration of a Kenzo Parfum D’Ete that my eyes frequently alight on with a certain nostalgic pleasure.

Naturally, in my increasing clumsiness – worse since my leg operations- good lord, hold onto your champagne flutes, Chapman is coming ! I must have knocked it off at some point without realizing it in one of my extra blunderbussy spasms – though I had definitely noted its green, effortlessly pleasant vanillic vapours drifting about the household semi-consciously- and when I did finally pick it up to track the damage, the half-drained flacon – a non-visible hairline crack ? – yet another breakage ! An uncalled for dose of vintagely macerated liquid then leaked further from the broken flower onto hands and sweater.

I had not been planning to wear this scent at all. It just existed in my presence : the occasional spray into the air, or a sniff from the ornate cap. But there I was, resplendent in The World Is Beautiful, so deeply ironic given the ever worsening headlines that continue to make you crawl deeper inside your over-familiar self on a daily basis – too weary to gasp or frenzy over them any more; the profound, profound horror that just one, aggrieved man-child in his unwavering hatred and rage, has the power to potentially destroy the rest of humanity.

I do still think the world is beautiful, though, even if currently reduced – spinally, and in terms of mobility and lucidity as I slowly recover from my two left knee operations while delaying and reconsidering the third – the other artificial joint implant : I simply couldn’t face any more, in truth; three consecutive anaesthesias and tissue butchering was simply too much to ask, too traumatizing….

Over this difficult and lonely last year, with all its aches and searing pain and self medications, I have nonetheless managed to better and deepen my relationships with everyone dear to me – even my cat ; the enforced time off has been wonderful in that regard (and speaking of important relationships, i do wish I had also been more present on here, my apologies ; I have unfinished posts and ideas and planned reviews that take half seed in the sediment but get blown away by the moment or dulled by painkillers); I been slavering over my book project when I have good days, and made significant progress with that; but still… I really don’t know where all the time has gone.

(Hello, and a very belated Happy New Year to you by the way)

Yes, cycling to and back from the gym, and even up our notoriously steep hill yesterday afternoon. – a perfect demonstration of how i have probably been overdoing it all along, forcing the progress because I have to go back to work in April when I should have been more sedentary and under ICE (but that of course depends on which health professional’s contradictory advice I adhere to ….. you have no idea how confusing all of this has been), I was reflecting that at the end of the day – and excuse these sentimental cliches – all that really matters ultimately is a deep appreciation of what surrounds us, a quest for understanding , and the bonds of friendship and love that bind and sustain our souls – while simultaneously grieving their impermanence; the coursing veins of mortality that exist in every heartbeat – but which also give this mysterious life that we have exquisite meaning.

The vernal beauty of the world around me ; the plum blossom quietly saturating the cold breeze: the plush new narcissus lining the entirety of the eight hundred year old Wakamiyoshi main Kamakura boulevard that links the Hachimangu shrine and the bright sea; the luminous faces of passing strangers; children blissfully ignorant of the strains of the future ; the glinting purity of the afternoon sunlight ; a lovely conversation I struck up with an elderly Japanese woman as she hobbled along the corridors of the gym with her walking stick and we exchanged various tidbits of orthopedica and life information : she said to me something along the lines of ‘it has been lovely talking to you; let’s protect and help each other through this’; which had me tearing at the edges , despite my morning sadness, I felt throughly alive.

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Perfume, always a vital buffer between the harshest, bone on bone realities and the yearning for the dreamy beyond, has been a constant, of course during this challenging time, though rather than voraciously curious about the new I have tended to be consecutively monogamous, wearing one choice on skin and clothes until I almost run out or spontaneously pivot – you know that feeling when you wake up and just know, very strongly, that yesterday’s scent profile just isn’t going to work for you today.

I went through an Ignoble Chinchilla phase over the pre-Christmas and Christmas period, layering anything sweet vanilla based – Shalimar, Vol De Nuit, with Dusita Tonka Latte – I was revelling in my warm sugared eiderdowns as the colder weather descended but it is possible that other people may have found it a bit sickening (I have come to realize how infrequently, in fact, I am complimented on my vintage, chypric affiliations like Ma Griffe, Chant D’Aromes etc – d turns his nose at them as I sprawl into grey gardens – so it is likely that the less perfume-historied individual on the street might also find my otherworlded sillages strangely unpalatable too… maybe I should just be keeping my Classic Perfumes to myself …)

This has emphatically not been the case with Fragonard Patchouli, a warm, rich, coumarinic rendition of the classic earth-toned wonder which apparently smells alarmingly sexy on me and not like spoiled cabbage- a real come -here-and-grab-you-nuzzler – on a brand new long black cashmere scarf – bought for me as a Christmas present by a friend in China to help me ‘wrap up and write’ – this perfume has been smelling male-witchy voluptuous and grounding – I have used it up to the last tenth and will have to get another bottle from Marks & Spencer when I go back to England this summer.

Another winner has been the now very pricey and long discontinued Gucci Envy For Men – a gorgeously fresh and spicy ginger-centered lavender amber that was destined to wear – though I have used it down to the dregs and will be scouring the dwindling recycle shops in search of a replenishment – this is one of those rare perfumes whose long lingering base accords please as much as the opening – I spray it on milli-vanilli and feel fabulous all day. Late nineties it might be (it doesn’t feel current, more timeless), but I wish I owned liters of the stuff.

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Gucci Envy For Men was created by Daniela Andrier, a purveyor of smooth, commercially appealing perfumes that feel as if they were born to exist before they actually did ( the hypnotically textile orange blossom heliotrope of the first Gucci Eau De Parfum; the whispering hush of Guerlain Angelique Noire; even when they eventually grate – Prada Candy, the Infusion D’Iris and its interminable cousins – there is a perfected sense of overall desired pleasantnesss over edginess – contrary to the niche preference for the novel and weird – skunk tincture! dried blood on asphalt ! cigarettes in lungs ! – I don’t believe is necessarily a bad thing when it comes to fragrance.

Similarly, Le Monde Est Beau, another Andrier late nineties gem, does feel like a commercial prototype. The contrast between persistent light vanilla tonka / cedar base and sharper, floral fruit top and middle accords has been done countless times since – practically the template for what now passes for perfume at the dire counters worldwide of Female Duty Free.

But there is an overapplied fug slug in so many of those sweetly nasty and chemicalized boob toboggans that is less present in Le Monde Est Beau, which is so startlingly fresh and so KENZO and green in its leafy basil, black currant mandarin, honeysuckle and oglaia odorata over blackberry and cherry blossom that when I started involuntarily wearing it that anxious, embittered morning the other day feeling the hours stretching before me and the swellings, twinges and cracks that have become my new normal, with its almost moronic, neonized innocence, I couldn’t help breaking out into a genuine smile.

The best Kenzo perfumes, in their childlike wonder of nature shot through with the best of the Japanese, idealized plastica fantastica, do capture an unjaded startlement of joyful simplicity that you realize is stil firmly within you even when you are in a bit of a low moment. Though I do, strongly wish, that I hadn’t brought the bottle with me to hospital for this review – my god Neil, you knew it was leaking but you decided to bring it in your bag ? Not sure these technicolour emanations are appealing to the masked and waiting in their own joint and bone pain purgatories (I am here to potentially reserve yet another, smaller operation for a right knee bone spur removal – joy of joys !); I should have thought.

But then again , it’s not going to kill them : it’s not the end of the world (is it? Is it ?). It is hard to always be bright and buoyant even if you get on top of your own troubles – and we all have them, let’s face it – life is no spring breeze – when the world around is shifting so tectonically we are in daily states of increasing bewilderment – and yet the pleasures do, undoubtedly remain. For me the world is beautiful – tragically so. Yet even a minor perfumed creation such as this- refreshing optimistic, not bound by dark, self-aggrandizing cynicism – just existing in the pursuit of providing an (admittedly somewhat facile ) happiness, still can infuse even the most melancholy day with a cheerful beam of sunshine.