The Black Narcissus

The top notes have gone. But then so have mine. And middle, and base, possibly, as well………but I will come to that in a minute.

Vivienne Westwood enjoys a cult status in Japan, where there is still a sizeable Anglomania (Oasis, who I detest, are worshipped here – I once met Liam Gallagher backstage after an Ocean Colour Scene concert – I was once in the band – and he was a twat, albeit with a quite stunning, wolf-like pair of sapphire peepers), everybody still goes on about The Beatles, and the J-fashionistas still venerate Alexander McQueen, but even more, the late Madam Westwood. In fact, the oddball girl across the street – lips full of piercings and shaved eyebrows and tartan leggings is a worshipper (a few winters ago, I saw her scrabbling in the iced slush like a sped up, FX-laced J-horror, snow collecting in her long black hair; scooping up enough snowbricks to make an eerie ice effigy – I stood there, transfixed, wishing I could film the scene, but then again I am friends with her mother and it seemed inappropriate; due to her British couture fixation, we refer to the daughter now as Vivienne-san).

Though usually pretty generous with my perfumes, that mute in a leather jacket is not getting my two Westwood perfumes; Boudoir and Libertine. The former, a powdery, filthy orange blossom is genius, and on me dries down to the most tobacco-y, hippiest josssticks; the latter a deliciously green fruited honeysuckle with patchouli-ish amber basenotes – a very strange concoction that evokes the wonderful Curious by Britney Spears (a fucked up magnolia) and even the algaei-ish singing pondskaters of Cacharel’s much maligned Eden; white-musky, but laden with passionfruit and pineapple and fresh green leaves with a laundromat-cute heart of jasmine and synthetic chevrefeuille; one of those blends that you know just works on immediate application in its entirety – immaculate from top to bottom but with just enough dose of eccentricity – this is Vivienne Westwood we are talking about, after all – to render it intellectually interesting as well as sensual.

I reached for my bottle of this last night on an impulse. This particular flacon is one that D picked up for me in a junkshop, my second bottle. Pleased though I was to have it again, it cannot be denied that the top notes are broken. Perhaps whoever had once owned the perfume neglectfully it left it out in the sun, or it was tossed in a cardboard box somewhere in its journey from owner to second hand landfill, but there is very little of the green remaining, and the florals are crushed. I sense its inner uniqueness nonetheless: breathing under the surface, and I am patient. Eventually, the honeysuckle musc that is the soul of the scent emerges (it is a gorgeously sunny this morning, and I am going to wear this to the gym and then up to the hospital : it still has that something), and faith in the overall integrity of the fragrance is restored.

**

It was strange how I got this one.

It was at my first school in Japan, about twenty five years ago – in fact probably right after Libertine was released here because the woman who bestowed it upon me was a fashion type absurdly beyond the ball (I couldn’t be more ambivalent about Fashion; on the one hand, aesthetics are everything to me – and, bizarrely, I was in Vogue Japan again this month in a piece that feels like pure fantasy if you translate it compared to the often painful realities of my recent existence (https://www.vogue.co.jp/article/geek-beauty-2026-neil) —without beauty, life means nothing to me and I appreciate every moment of that in whatever form it comes in every minute of every day on a constant basis); at the same time, fashion is the most vacuously pretentious and passive aggressive form of human endeavour I can think of – to work in the industry must surely just to be surrounded by the most shallow and fascistly judgemental c”””s in existence – and how mediocre was The Devil Wears Prada 2, incidentally, no matter how sublime our Meryl was at certain moments?)

As usual, I digress – and Jesus do I digress these days; I can hardly think straight, which has been hard, going back into the classroom after a year off work having hideous surgeries that weren’t quite successful and then on top of that spinal and other issues that have really knocked me for six, what with all the painkillers and god knows what else affecting organs and stamina and wellness in general, I have felt like a condemned jellyfish; a misdiagnosis of the terrifying stenosis, where the nerves constrict in the back, causing agony ; prescribed blood pumping drugs to widen the veins and nerves when I am already one of the most overtuned nerve people on the planet; gooosh, the head spins in the classroom as I stare at 46 eyes staring back at me and try not to collapse at the blackboard, ooh you better belooba

-sorry, I knew this would happen; that as soon as my waters broke and I finally starting writing a post all hell would break loose in the afterbirth – and I will definitely not be frying up this placenta.

Where was I ?

Oh yes, I was talking about that bobblehead.

Because she did have a bobblehead. As in, a bobblehead. Like one of those painted toys with a detachable head that wobbles on purpose when it is too big for her body. But made more difficult by far by wearing platform clogs and comme des garcons type garments that looked ridiculous – if gaggably mesmerizing – in a language school environment when all the other dullards were turning up in suits or leisurewear and she would come in, Fellini/esque: dressed up every time as though she were a nun in a Van Eyk painting at the front row of London Fashionweek. And sensed something responsive; an empathy; she could talk to me; I knew all the fashion houses she was paening to; I was also a sensitive geekfreek like her and even once gave her a cassette tape compilation drenched in L Occitane Patchouli after she had arrived for the lesson one day with a bottle of Vivienne Westwood Libertine ‘;trust me, as a teacher you don’t often get gifted new bottles of perfume by your students – and I was thrilled.

*

Do I sound like a bitch?

Yes.

I don’t doubt it. The drudging myself up from the sinkhole of unwellness has turned me into a curmudgeonus grinch (left knee replacement still very much a work in progress, but slowly getting there; the right one postponed because I truly couldn’t trust if the surgeon had done a proper job with the left; instead relenting to a monstrous nerve disabling operation on the right – ‘radio ablation therapy’; six syringes; three local anaesthetics that were inserted and that were excruciating and then three other foul substances injected directly in order to burn the nerve endings – what was I thinking say yes to that, FFS? I don’t know, I have relinquished self authority in the last few years to the medical establishment; too exhausted to resist any longer; ok, if that’s what you think is the right thing to do, doctor, I suppose I will go with it….then ending up with a floppy right foot hanging off at the angle and walking with a slight ragdoll paraplegia that I forced my nerve endings to overcome – literally; feeling the nerve signal going from my brain all the way down and making that motherfucker attach to my ankle and walk as nature originally intended, just like Uma Thurman).

((this not the only way of gradually clawing my way out of the sewage strewn cesspit of my weakened physique and doom-sludging brain fog; the cliched expression just one day at a time really has been useful, and phoning friends; getting though one day of dizzying overwhelm, one day at a time (loving being back in the classroom simultaneously; the connection! the beautiful youth! the sense of connection and purpose! the rediscovering of my pedagogical talent, which was lurking underneath all along!). Still, it has come with a cost; hardly being able to see the register; vertiginous swaying as I turned my head and stand up to write something on the blackboard – I really must get a new pair of glasses; what the hell is wrong with me; obviously, these are not the right prescription any more or is it just renal failure?); but a fantastic consultation with an actually positive back specialist a couple of weeks ago helped immensely ; no, you don’t have a trapped nerve or stenosis, so you don’t need that medicine (TF!), you do have a herniated disc in your lower lumbar vertebrae- and boy can I feel it – but no osteoporosis or arthritis in the rest of your back – you have good alignment and a strong spine so get down the gym and cycle and strengthen your core muscles and wear this Jean Paul Gaultieresque corset for good measure – all I need now is a pointy pale pink satin cone bra —-no, the JPG is my addition, although he did ‘prescribe a corset‘ ; and he did say everything else; but how nice to actually have someone human and fun and uplifting rather than the sad racist fuck who made me feel so miserable as he spat out his stenosis diagnosis I could have happily mangled him up in his own MRI machine. Nurse! Oh dear! What is this dripping ?There seems to be a crushed bone specialist in the nerve tunnel- could you clean up the mess o kudasai ))

But I believe this was a review of a Vivienne Westwood fruity floral. So let me get back to that then.

I am on the up. Which is why I am back on here. I am definitely stronger. Physically and mentally. And obviously, it was never going to be straightforward going from isolation and rehabilitation and in a very passive position for all that time to suddenly thrusting myself back into the classroom where I am the engine.

Last week I finally got on top of it all though; properly connected with each student, even remembering their names. So perhaps I am more intact than I had realized : Perhaps I have not lost all of my notes after all. Imperfect as hell, for sure; degraded, undeniably. A definite whiff of deterioration. But like the lovely perfume I am going to spray on after I take a shower in a minute – then wait for an hour for it to develop into that still rather delightful heart…..still hopefully not entirely without its uses.

smells fucking amazing

Sakura– centred perfumes are, in general, pretty vile.

But I realized today that the blossoms, when in multitudes, really do have the most delicately ravishing smell : against the blue sky near my house, they were warm, fruity, almondly fecund; cold; aloof -reaching briefly into the eternal

Several days later, I am still reeling from watching the Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix, Inside The Manosphere.

Although I was very aware of the likes of Andrew Tate and his disciples, and had read extensive articles on the topic of the newest misogny and aggressive bro culture that has infiltrated the minds of emotionally undernourished young men and boys worldwide (looksmaxxing anyone; smashing yourself deliberately in the face to make you look like a chiselled boxer?), I don’t think I had ever actually exposed myself to the reality of how these people operate; how they speak; how they denigrate; the sheer brutal hatred that shines from their eyes in the name of learning to ‘nut up’ or be a proper man. How they treat real, living women directly in view of the camera. I was horrified, flabbergasted.

There were several times in the programme when we gasped out loud. What these muscled up aggravators say to the women around them is so insulting, violent, awful, I could hardly sleep after and it has been going round and round in my head ever since. The pumped up aggression and body fascism; the gym addicted narcissism. The bedpost notches (‘the body count’). The horror of living in the Internet Age when any balance seems to have gone out the window and how this has become normalized for millions of hardened, frightened males around the globe. What it forebodes for the future.

If it seems as if I have been living under a rock, I really haven’t. We are all conscious of so much now but are unable to process it. The Tates and others like them are embraced at The White House: ultimately, we are unable to escape the Monster At The Centre Of It All, the great ‘POTUS’, whose influence in this regard has been incalculable; Epstein; Weinstein; #MeToo and then the swing back from it in completely the other direction in visceral reaction to the Pronoun Police and their left wing Gender Piety (which, for me, was also sometimes too calcified and unrealistic and oppressive) :I remember the moment that ‘Toxic Masculinity’ became the by-word for virtually all men and I though oh no, even if such a thing exists – and it does, surely; I hardly know a single woman who hasn’t been assaulted or affected by it in some way and macho behaviour truly is often very poisonous – but I also knew, instinctively, that there was no way half the world’s population was going to be tarred with the same brush and suddenly become ‘cancelled’. There would inevitably be an uprising; a rejection; an upward tsunami of testosterone in revenge.

And here we are.

I have been a victim of Male Rage quite a lot in my life, and others have been victims of mine. It is most definitely a thing (so is the female version, obviously but I am just talking from my own standpoint as I have not been able to experience that personally). Most men contain fifteen times more testosterone than most women; testosterone increases aggressivity. So there you go. There are male traits, characteristics; I demonstrate many of them myself. But surely the strict traditional binaries of gender are a still horrorshow for everyone – so restrictive, so much pressure to perfectly embody one or the other that it is difficult, sometimes to not go round the bend – I found growing up terrifying in that regard – constantly petrified I would be ‘found out’, that I was too girly; ashamed that I just couldn’t help myself dancing wildly to Shalamar’s A Night To Remember and autohypnotizing myself on my nine year old bedroom dancefloor to Blondie’s Rapture. I was just being myself – and I am still dancing to Debbie Harry -but words like sissy or poof still stabbed me like a mortal sword plunge through the gut. Hiding myself inside my young body; squaring my shoulders and trying to ‘walk like a man’. Folding myself awkwardly into a box that felt like an imprisoning straitjacket.

It is beyond my parameters to discuss an entire world of maleness, what it entails, and where it originates; so much has been written about how boys and men are ‘falling behind’ academically and in the work place; how they have lost their confidence now that traditional male behaviours have allegedly become so stigmatized that they don’t know what to do with themselves any more; how to act – and turning all females (their beloved mothers and sisters and daughters aside- one aspect of the documentary that was genuinely so pathetic; the tired old madonna-whore syndrome) into a despised enemy. To be conquered. Slighted. Raped.

*

It sickened me. And watching the screen – here we go – you could see how they must smell. Doused in angry aromachemicals designed to phallically thrust their way into the female consciousness, a woman picked up on a tacky street in a tacky Spanish resort town invaded by horrible Brits and Americans and turned into a slaggish meatmarket of the lowest common denominator; an easily legible olfactory symbol to have her abject and ready. Here come the man. Scent; such a powerful, three dimensional forcefield around a person: one that can accentuate, and exaggerate certain aspects of a persona to cartoonish and grotesque levels; the ‘beast mode’ ‘and high projection’ high street perfumes now in circulation that denote a pig that ready to fuck. No subtlety. Just that bleak and furious viagra.

It needn’t be like this. What I was watching was insanity. Yes, you can say it is peripheral, a minority – but when governments are inviting these people into their buildings and administrations you know that that is not true; the influence these people have is real and monumental. Witness ‘Adolescence’ – that stunningly created drama that showed just what can happen when a vulnerable boy can come into contact with this vile pollution; it seems trivial to discuss smell in this context, perhaps, but the greater the ferocity of the Axe deodorants and the high street ‘perfumes’ contrasted with the moronic sugar of their female equivalents, I think it is fair to say that the currents in society are physically represented in the molecules that are heavily contaminating the literal air. What I was seeing in that programme is borne out precisely by what I receive in my nostrils the second I arrive back at the airport in the UK.

There are other possibilities, surely. In philosophy, of course, but also even in scent. Perfume can be the very opposite of a vicious assault on the senses aimed at your immediate surrender; it can so easily confer a magnetic aura; and enigmatic haze, an intellectual, emotional or erotic beckoning that augments you rather than turning you into a bombastic silo of x and y chromosome cliches that inevitably lead to a rut. Watching The Manosphere I could only guess what the ‘men’ in question – the rottweiler bros – would spray themselves with; the women too, who conformed to every possible stereotype of what you imagine the tacky ‘beauty influencer’ looks like; hair dyed cracked blonde; Donald Trump levels of foundation to dye your skin orange (why? WHY does skin have to look like this? I have never understood it, the reasoning behind it; the pancake up to the neck, it is so fucking ugly; who wants to caress someone’s cheek and come away with dark yellow panda prints?); that slathered on Kardashian eye makeup, those twitching, false lashes like dead butterflies caught in a glue trap.

I remember in the eighties when the first versions of harsh masculinity started appearing on the shelves. I detested them from the moment I smelled them – Dunhill, Tsar, Jazz – I felt personally infringed upon, as I did when Charlton Heston appeared on a screen. I have written about this before, in relation to Sauvage, so don’t want to repeat myself too much here (I can imagine some of you already rolling your eyes, yes yes Neil – we know you hate aggressive men’s perfumes), but as we were walking along yesterday in the Ofuna sunshine discussing our reactions to the documentary again – sometimes you ingest things so monumental and hideous you have no reactions to them; it is all so understood by the other person that it seems too pointlessly obvious to even go into it, but they inevitably resurface again later, and thinking about smell, I was saying to D, that once upon a time, perfumes, fragrances, ‘colognes’ if that is the only word you can handle using, were so much more subtle and mischievous; clever, even; sexually nuanced – less oppositional. They weren’t ‘transgender’ or compromising a person’s man or womanhood. They just contained multitudes. Iconic masculines like Fabergé Brut or Old Spice were powdery fougere carnations but innocently/lasciviously smooth and sweet; Elvis wore them, as did my dad and cousins. There was a cheapness, yes, but also a suave mystery that made you ponder; inhale. Look again. And this man’s lady – while he was slinking in Aramis or Givenchy Gentleman might have been wearing Cabochard or Miss Dior – sharp, deep, green, growling, reaching deep into patchouli’d sexuality and chic – or perhaps Chanel Nº5 – which I was wearing yesterday – also, in fact, no simplistic ‘bimbo’: with its layers of warmth and cold, masculinity and femininity; a bodily frankness in its plushed fading stages that suggests the pleasures of mutual entwinement; curiosity, and shared pleasure- not the callous, bed-notching hardfucking proposed by the dicks on the programme where ‘the opposite sex’ is a mere conquest, to be tossed aside afterwards like a bag of trash. You imagine the wearer of the original Dior, Eau Sauvage, or a rascal like Jules, being genuinely interested in the woman he is pursuing a night with – the chase of the seduction an excitement, sure, and why not? but you also imagine him wanting her, intrigued by her; worshipping her even………..not hating her.

*

I think one of the reasons I am so (naively?) reacting so strongly to ‘Inside The Manosphere’ is because of where I live. Japan is hardly gender equality paradise – quite the opposite – there is certainly a lot of domestic violence here, Internet trolls are majorly on the rise, and just look how much groping goes on in public transport on a daily basis. There is an inbuilt resistance to women working in a variety of professions that are totally patriarchal in structure and don’t even try to hide it; even the language itself, in which men and women speak using different words to denote the self divides the sexes linguistically in a way that hard for the resistant native English speaker to adapt to (d and I can only say ‘watashi’, the basic, generalized ‘I’, never the standard masculine ‘boku’ and ‘ore’ – words I could no more bring myself to use than than I could say ‘atashi’ or ‘uchi’ – the feminine equivalents which would sound ridiculously camp and equally wrong, demonstrating that we have not really ever tried to adapt to the culture properly, stuck in our own particular lefty corner of gender liberal stubbornness).

As a perpetual foreigner, I will never really full infiltrate this culture and understand everything – the more intricate intricacies that still elude me. But at the same time, I have spent decades surrounded by Japanese colleagues and students, and what I observe and smell – there, but also out on the street, on the trains, everywhere in the cities – are my own genuine observations and inhalations. And the only ones stinking up the atmosphere with their bro-fumes are the increasing number of westerners, who smell so wrong in this air and stick out like toxic, rusting nails. Odourlessness is quite common; so are the natural smells – pleasant or unpleasant – that emanate from the average human body – neither smoking nor squiddy snacks do anyone many favours.But otherwise, when people are perceptibly fragrant, the pH balance is much nearer the centre than it in the western hemisphere; women in cedar/sandalwood, sweet boisés; or else fresh fruity or shampoo-like; or powder-kimono soft; but the boys also – clean; floral, savon-ish; cute+ Shiseido Tsubaki is a hair wash and conditioning combo I have mentioned before that is practically the National Perfume; washing powders and fabric softeners also sometimes have this rich, mid-octaved red floral smell that can sometimes be a little too loud in volume but still ultimately very pleasant; and actually, when up close, quite sensual, totally dependent on the individual. A person’s natural odour rising up with these scented additions. And therein lies the attractiveness; their breath, their skin essence , float up from within these abstractions, as in a vision.

Which is why I was really very fine yesterday wearing a rather pleasing limited edition perfume by Shiseido, Hanatsubaki – picked up, of course, for nothing from the junk yard (don’t you love the painted camellia on the box? – I do), and which is nothing original I suppose – an inheritor of some eighties and nineties fresher florality but which does have a convincingly fresh camellia-esque vernality and which smells lovely on the hair when wearing Chanel Nº5 – d said liked the combination when he leaned in – and so did I.

I am not, of course, that every male should be switching to a scent combination that could be read by many as being totally lacking in masculinity. But I felt entirely natural. A bit horny, actually. My body brings out interesting facets of the Chanel. Ambery, a bit naughty. Myself. And, as we walked under the blue sky, past the new cherry and peach blossom and the swathes of narcissi, I felt blissfully, blissfully, a million, million miles from those poor, misbegotten creatures in Marbella drowning pitifully – but so dangerously! – in their rabid anger, conspiracy theories, incel frustrations; their pointless, prophecy self-fulfilling cycles of woman-hating, noxious gender violence, and self hatred.

When the flower is used optimally ….

https://theblacknarcissus.com/2012/12/10/caron-infini-1970/

Nothing against incontinence. After all, various valve issues are in the family – it is probably my destiny.

But people aren’t honest enough about narcissi – which are blowing their tits off right now in the wind: some exquisite, some truly foul– but still mesmerizing (I am talking to you, paperwhites – halitosis on stalks).

I picked some anyway.

There are no flowers on earth more resplendently dodgy nor ambivalent

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ?