The Black Narcissus

For £125 you could buy a decent item of new clothing or even a low end niche : full bottles of non- high street fragrances rarely come cheaper.

There are a few I have my eye on – I bought d a small travel size Abel Miami Split for d on our anniversary — I know it will come in handy for a performance with its dazzlingly realistic fresh banana-ness — but it is also pleasingly wearable in and of itself : creative conceptual perfumery with a humorous wink.

I rather like it. The sandy, spiced undertow reminds me of Comme Des Garçons Cologne – one of our old favourites – and I am sure it will be an enjoyable wear for this coming summer in Japan and in England.

*

But liking something isn’t the same as loving something, and this Tuesday — pay day — I stole away before work to my secret treasure trove a couple of cities away — I hadn’t been in eleven months and after all the excruciations I have been through in recent times I felt I deserved a modest splurge – wondering if I might not find something that would exalt and thrill.

My hunch did not disappoint.

Besides a very old Y savon parfume — I love the louche seventies lounge bar of the box – this is more of an objet collectible than a functioning soap – I picked up a large Patou Joy edt for a friend ( as a joke I had sprayed on a pristine Eau De Joy on his wrist with a how about this for pissy expecting exclamations of horror rather than joie – but his reaction were the opposite : d is going to hand it over to him this evening )

;;;

((( but Joy is the very last thing I can get away with wearing myself (who can?!): I just adore that original black bottle with the red cap that I find extraordinarily visually beautiful so couldn’t possibly part with that precious flacon))

Aesthetics really do matter when it comes to The Perfume Experience..Luxury’ –/as it is understood these days — absolutely bores me to death as an idea and reality, but there is undeniably something luxurious; luxuriant about a fully successful marriage of the tactile; the visual, and the olfactory , not to mention the poetic and the intellectual – I want it all.

The current Guerlain packagings only give me mild pleasure when I see them stacked up with their preposterous prices and only so-so designs – I want to fall hook, line and sinker with the whole shebang. Merely being old and vintage of course does necessarily bestow the qualities I am talking about ; some of the seventies / eighties’ iterations are certainly too gaudy or froufrou clunka-dunka — but the zigzagging Grecian geometrics of the above classic sixties’ designs have always pleased me immensely; many Mitsoukos and Vols De Nuit have, and continue to grace my collection

( this VdN is olfactory perfection – it will go in no time the way I wear it ; no box, but who cares when it is only ¥2200 (£10) and captures my body and soul?) )

….Chant d’Aromes though, my god : is that really what I am seeing in the glass cabinet for just twenty quid ? A gobsmackingly good find ; that mirabelle plum, those delirious honeysuckles over moss… what a glorious creation!

D may not like it on me – he never does enjoy the Ma Griffe type of floral chypre – though he quite likes Calandre and Caleche, which were always more androgynous and softly clandestine ( thanks again Victoria for that lovely Eau De Calandre you sent recently … such a nerve cushion ..)

( also Rive Gauche – so similar to Calandre- possibly slips metallically into corseted lingerie though I think the eventual sandalwood / vetiver eventually render it convincing on me – : i couldn’t resist this vintage bottle let alone a slightly musty but still rather lovely Ricci Farouche for the equivalent of £1.50).

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All very well and good.

But a Shalimar in the original purple velvet box…. and then a vintage L’Artisan Parfumeur Vanilia from 1978 in another case as well? — a truly lovely, exquisite ylang vanilla flower like a young honey bee alighting on orchid …. these are the very essence of perfect wearability on me and I could hardly believe my good fortune – and all for less than a 50ml bottle of Matiere Premiere with fifty pounds still to spare.

Contemporary Shalimars are fair enough, but there is something about the currently used leather/ bergamot clashes in the opening immediacies that induces a certain pituitary nausea. The older extraits, like this one, still have the lemon and baby powder inherent contradictions but are also chock full of all the Peru Balsams and opoponax and styrax you so desire, melding with the coumarins and vanillin: the last time I had one of these particular vintages was in Nagasaki about two decades ago, and I have been craving another bottle of it ever since.

I remember it was unbearably humid and hot; a bruised black and grey sky, pre-thunderstorm, the sky about to crack, and as we got off the overly air-conditioned bus and fell out into the Kyushu August broil I came on with an instantaneous splitting headache.

And yet in the confines of our hotel, I was in the middle of finally properly falling in love with real Shalimar; when it unfurled to the base neither of us could quite believe how incredible it was smelling on me : deeply sensual ; hypnotic; erotic.

Excitedly getting home on Tuesday evening with my haul after a rather gruelling day at work, d asleep upstairs, I changed out my teaching clothes and just sat on the sofa downstairs breathing it all in. Small helpings of Vanilia and Shalimar — not going to be profligate with these this time, I now know how hard they are to come by — but worn close together ….. …… ……………my oh my.

Yesterday was our 33rd anniversary.

If I didn’t have bursitis of the elbow – my god, what next ?! such a collapsing old crock …

I would write in depth. About this and a million other things, plenty of them perfumed.

But I can’t.

Suffice it to say, I came back late from work, we had sparkling and a midnight feast on the balcony, reminisced a little and agreed that we could hardly relate to the kids we were then but were glad to be the versions of ourselves we are now – crumbling skeleton included.

We got together on a June 17th. I was out with my friend George. D was out with his friend Elissa. We all danced to house music in the basement of King’s College Cambridge and then flirted and gravitated towards our future partners.

Heady days…

Congratulations to G and E – we will always have the same anniversary – down to minutes and seconds …

x

Fragrancing is an art form. But it needn’t necessarily be limited to aromatics suspended in alcohol. In Japan, nioibukuro, or scent sachets, are secreted on the person to give off subtle aroma. I once knew a man who smelled divine every time I encountered him- his cunning technique? A bottle of lavender essential oil kept in his jeans pocket.

I carry freshly plucked gardenias and jasmine in my shirt pockets or wallet as a natural soliflore; I use citrus oil infused Vaseline as perfume ; I even once dazzled a friend at the theatre wearing vintage Vol De Nuit while scratching the peel of a yuzu that was hidden inside my winter coat – her praise for the combined smell was far more effusive than for the stage production itself.

Teabags are a new departure for me — though I realize that I have just lied. A cheap but very beautiful and very bergamotty Sri Lankan Earl Grey once graced the interior of my bag and was almost disorienting to the senses it smelled so tea-y

— but I don’t think I have ever ‘worn a tea bag’ – or tea bags on my actual person before – not until last week.

It was an unusual combination.

In the morning, though I never wear ‘Fancy French Fine Fragrance’ – particularly not anything muskily, femininely poetic in the classroom, out of the blue on Friday just as I was about to leave the house and needing some kind of soothing, emotional crutch, I suddenly had a hard craving for Annick Goutal’s – sorry, I still say ANNICK because all mine are in the vastly preferable original frou frou balletic bouteilles — I needed the green hyacinthed and honeysuckled loveliness of Grand Amour (1996), a highly romantic take on Guerlain Chamade, figuring that if necessary I could open a window if it didn’t feel right – but it really did.

The perfume blessed my commute. I never usually wear it, but on Friday morning Grand Amour was the perfect companion; gentle but not insipid; fresh but not naff; possibly more androgynous than I had realized, limpidly ambrous with a magical throw.

Who needs more than that, I hear you holler.

Passing a herbal tea emporium nestled in Atsugi station mine nostrils did pick up the most perfect trail of tropicsl lychee. This shop provides iced coolers of their selections in glass containers and miniature taps – practically Caron urn fountains – and the green rooibos ‘litchi’ as they spelled it – which iteration of this fruit spelling do you prefer, aesthetically ?- was the promoted tisane of the day; gorgeous, really, both in fragrance and flavour, even if I doubted the naturalness of the vibrant L-fragrancing itself.

I bought a small mini pack of five teabags knowing internally how I was probably going to use them – ie not in a mug with boiling water – and the second I ripped open the paper envelope I was devoured by a slew of lychee odour that would rip off the head of Yves Saint Laurent’s much regretted Champagne/ Yvresse ( and without that perfume’s melting teeth and chypric decadence – instead just a subtle backdrop of green rooibos ). Doing damage limitation – and knowing I was a weirdo as closed the teabags in my upper suit jacket pocket I found myself stirringly intoxicated by the incredible duality of the wilting hyacinth Bulgarian rose of Grand Amour with a ravishment of subtropical Japanese lychee in the top — it was almost deranging to the senses and it is possible that one girl in the class may or may not have been stoppering up her nose with several fingers but somehow I still couldn’t remove it from my person: so lynched was I by the lychee.

D noticed the melange on me later and approved ; and so the next day I wore the same perfumes : Grand Amour and a bag of lychee rooibos, also to a theatre performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I am going to buy some more from the shop when I go there again this Friday – ( I also want to experiment with other flavours – imagine APRICOT). Call me a madman if you will, but dear reader, I tell you :: this was a floral, fruititious DELIGHT.

Like the rotting banana astride its 10 carat amphibian throne at Mar-A-Lago — is this rather wonderful perfume a cheeky reference to the plapface in chief and his Geminian, drooling brain-schisms? – any perfume with a thrillingly realistic banana peel and fruit top melange will immediately stand out in even the edgiest of niche perfumeries. It smells, quite simply- yes you guessed it – bananas.

I laughed out loud. That yellow blast of Floridian musa at the beginning of the perfume sent me on a whirl of nostalgic hyper-bananes : natural, synthetic – I loved chewy b-candies at the sweet shop as a kid as well as ice slushy milkshakes – Miami Split definitely has a whiff of dessert – and is probably more what Abel had in mind than an addled Ronald Clump sliding about on mushy slippered banana skins ; had I been flush with cash I would probably have purchased it on the spot.

It dries down to ‘white oud’- a curious proposition that shouldn’t work, but in my view emphatically does ( this perfume definitely won’t be for everyone, in particular my friend Michael who has actual bananaphobia and would immediately be sent a gaggin’), the perfumers at Abel – incredibly, an all natural fragrance house that elevates non synthetic ingredients to new creative heights – having a deft hand in layering ingredients, even novel, headspace fermentation techniques as they used here – to diaphanous, sophisticated effect.

I used up my extrait edition of the same house’s lovely Cobalt Amber many summers ago – a pink peppery labdanum that floats from the skin in a sensuously gentle manner – and would very much like another bottle; this is the kind of scent you can just spray on of a morning without too much thought, knowing that you will smell nice the rest of the day – and was also intrigued by the mood-fizzing aldehydic uplift of their very fresh and happy-inducing Laundry Day – soda-fresh lime, passion fruit layered over sinuous vetiver – this would make an excellent work perfume and I plan to make it mine come the hot weather – but it is undeniably the Banana that gets the most applause in this review. If only from the point of view of olfactive novelty, I need this in my collection. It made me smile – unlike that other old fruit in the ‘White House’ who is ready for the bin — and makes me retch.

It is also fortunate that you don’t have to ransack the coffers of your own banana republic to acquire these scented lovelies either: small affordable bottles are available at the Nose Shop in NewWoman Yokohama just enough to quench the thirst for the yellow Chiquita -while not sufficient to push you over straight over the edge of the dreaded banana precipice. Next pay day I plan on getting all three.

The air is heavy with fish, and sea water droplets

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