The money, all 500, 000 yen of it, had just been handed over to the woman at the travel agency when he got the phone call: ” I don’t think we can go. There has been a locust invasion. ” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was our scenario yesterday, and how utterly, and bitterly disappointing!

 

 

 

It has been a long-time dream of mine to go to Madagascar, heart of vanilla, and mysterious animals and plants; Duncan, as I was working, was up in Yokohama finally about to hand over the quite considerable amount of money that we had saved up for the flight, and I was in a delicious tension of excitement that the moment was finally arriving where the flight would be booked and we could begin properly planning for our adventure to the vanilla trails, the perfumed island of Nosy Be where you can watch the ylang ylang flowers being distilled while chameleons cling oddly to orchid vines and lemurs languidly curl themselves from the trees. I was scared as well, as Madagascar is not without its dangers, but, call me a fool, the thought that I might actually get to see a vanilla plant growing its pods in the Indian Ocean sun, even see one get picked and prepared for the curing treatment, made me almost stop my breath in anticipation: I have wanted to see these tropical essences I so adore in the flesh for so long, and yesterday, at 3pm, it was about to happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Madgascar here we come’ wrote Duncan on Facebook, to a flourish of replies, although Marina had written that there were locusts, something I think I had heard about vaguely, but had pushed to the back of my mind, imagining a seasonal swarm of them that would soon flutter away by the time we arrived in all our horse-blinkered splendour on the islands. And then I wisely decide to check up on my friend’s advice, having flippantly initially written that ‘locust or no locust’ I was going all the same, but good lord look at these hideous Biblical storms of insectoid plague cruttering above the people’s heads and destroying their food. Bloody hell I had no idea whatsoever that this was happening, how oblivious to reality I have been, just childishly dreaming about those drips of ylang ylang essential oil, just extracted, dropping perfumedly into the glass receptacles of the distillery as I look enrapturedly on, when in fact the rest of the island is possibly starving to death. Some reports say that the insects can stay up to seventeen years, and a decade is reasonable guess too unless the country gets aid from rich countries immediately and they start to fight the locusts. Those fucking locusts. LOCUSTS for god’s sake!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The island of Nosy Be is apparently so far untouched, though there is no guarantee that the plague will not move up to the north. In any case, I am sure not going to be swaying in my hammock sipping cocktails and inhaling the famed isle’s perfumed breeze while the rest of the country starves to death like some callous colonialist, so it looks like our holiday is off, the adventure into vanilla, direct to the source.

 

 

 

Next spring I am to be doing a Vanilla Evening at Perfume Lover’s London, following on from the series I did at Olfactoria on Vanilla, a scent I adore and am obsessed with. I want to not only delve into the delights of vanilla perfumes but also go straight to its actual DNA, the orchid, that difficult, hand-pollinated beauty that makes those vanillin-drenched pods that so allure me, so although it looks as though the Madagascar trip is off (I can’t even believe I am writing this), I am going to have to find an alternative. Yesterday was a day of absolute misery for me. All of this happened just before my company’s nyushashiki, or opening ceremony ‘party’ for the new slaves, sorry, initiates, no sorry I must mean new recruits, new teachers, and though I was doing my best to remain upbeat and cheerful as I was the only foreigner among two hundred Japanese and we must appear the perfect English gentleman! with every gulp of beer I felt myself disappearing and becoming smaller, more alienated. The great disappointment of what I have been dreaming about for so long not coming to fruition, the cruel immersion into the reality of the working world where I feel so restricted and curtailed

 ( I really do need to leave and do something else; I can feel my soul straining against my rib cages sometimes, desperate to be freed from the bullshit of the framework, the system, the performance, the assessment ) after the bliss of being free and myself, all of it made me feel so depressed I came home sodden, dejected, and black as hell. And to think: there are people whose lives are at stake, properly threatened by these foul, food-mad insects, and there I am, a spoiled, impossibly rich-in-comparison white man with a job, and food, complaining and whining about not being able to savour the frivolous scent of the vanilla vine. Like the locusta migratoria capito, I feel like I just deserve to be squashed. 

 

 

 

 

 

A fresh, pleasant,  prim and proper, yet slightly humourless creature that was quite anomalous in the Guerlain lineup when it was first released– no powdery gourmand tones, no vague hint, even, of curve-licking odalisque – Champs Elysées, a somewhat distancing, snooty, cleaner-than-thou scent of tight-waisted, glassy imperviousness, was created, in the mid nineties,  among a short-lasted, miniature wave of neo-classicism.

Alongside Cartier’s So Pretty, Gucci’s Envy, and their American equivalents Estée Lauder‘s Pleasures and White Linen Breeze, this new departure for Guerlain heralded in a new, rain-clear floralcy; well-mannered to a fault; upright: petals-and-leaves only if you please: no musks and vanillas nor any other funky business……just that girded, upright, floral frame around which to structure your smiling, but guarded, PTA- friendly persona.

Yet I like it. I wear it ( in vintage ). We need such scents sometimes: scents for all manner of moods and situations, and Champs Elysées is, in my opinion, rather lovely. It is a well balanced floral that gleams with the tonic green of April:  sharp, penetrating blackcurrant leaves and buddleia flowers grace a clarified, wistful mimosa, sharp, green rose, and almond blossom/ hibiscus in new, optimistic fashion.

 

Champs Elysees is a unique perfume that I would recommend wholeheartedly for those who want to smell in control, ‘classical’, yet with a certain girdled, sexual impermeability that can be strangely beckoning and enticing. A lady at a Japanese department store once told me that although this perfume attracts fewer buyers now than it once did, those that do wear it will probably wear it for life. It is still in production, still has its admirers, and, by now, despite the naysayers ( Luca Turin in particular),  it is probably deserving of something like (minor) classic status. I might wear a little today.

It has been a great two weeks. Off from work, cherry blossom viewing in Tokyo; piano, films, exhibitions, lying around doing nothing, finding vintage perfumes in antique shops, my kind of time. Quite sociable as well: although these days D and I seem to be swapping our traditional extroversion/introversion ( I am now, in some ways, veering more towards the latter, finding social situations a stressful bind, while he is Mr Bonhomie), we have intermittently been catching up with old friends, acquaintances, and enjoyably for me, I am pleased to say, made some new ones as well.

        me the f**ng poser

and the

d in Tokyo

I was a bit worried about Sunday night, though, as a whole bunch of people I didn’t know were coming round for dinner;  friends of Duncan’s and their friends as well, and I didn’t know what to expect. In any case, we put on a decent spread of food, the people came, and, as it turned out, everyone got on like a house on fire. Fortunately, my ‘Japanese sister’, Aiko, daughter of our landlords (though I think of them more as my J-parents; they live next door) was home for the weekend, and she had come round earlier to help with the food preparation, which immediately put me more at ease – it’s like being with family.

me and Aiko

I walked down the stairs and into the kitchen and there it was – a quivering, disturbing, beauteous jasmine lingering in the air – ah yes, she is wearing Serge Lutens Sarrasins today, her own perfumed holy grail, one I introduced her to and one that she immediately begged her husband to order for her from Paris for her birthday as soon as she smelled it. Funny how a scent that I love in the bottle, but which smells so wrong on me, should become so resplendent on Aiko, but then this is often the case :  we realize that we don’t really even know a perfume’s true potential until we have smelled it on different people, and this I truly understood on Sunday night when, as you might expect, we all headed upstairs to the perfume room after dinner, and amid much raucous hilarity, proceeded to raid the perfume cabinets and sample boxes.

I do find the process of picking out a perfume for someone I hardly know quite fascinating. Of course the guests were free to look and spray, but I find in general that people are just too overwhelmed to know where to begin and wait to be guided, and I am more than happy to oblige. Going on intuition, their physicality, their persona and skin, I can usually come up with something quite good, even a perfect hit sometimes if I also go with the counter-intuitive gamble and choose something shocking    ( ‘I wonder if….’), although I can just as easily choose something very wrong – hippie Oz professor Frances despised Guerlain Herba Fresca, and Parfum d’Hermès smelled immediately ridiculous (too powdery, flouncy, ballgowny) on Buddhist sophisticate Joan, though speaking of balls, I then found myself on a strange whim going for the extrait of Bal à Versailles, almost as a joke (” why don’t you try this opulent skank-fest for size”) and the unanimous verdict was that we had hit the jackpot:  we all gave the thumbs up straight away to this one-  you know when a perfume works, and this was WORKING: yes it was erotic, and warm and ambery and animalic, but she also made it mysteriously elegant ( I happened to also have a spare miniature parfum to hand so she will be wearing it to a gala this weekend)

….. I would love to be there to inhale her perfume as she walks out the door…..

+

Now to the men.

Dietrich, tall, long-blond haired, poverty-stricken, fast-talking polyglot German geometrist, came to the realization, to his great dismay considering how much everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves, that through allergies and possibly Japanese pollution, or just through sheer hereditary damn genetics that he has no sense of smell. This is a horrible lack to have, and we all felt for him but sprayed him anyway……..  all thought that the expertly elegant, yet fully testosteroned Amouage Epic Man was a hilariously apposite choice given his stature; he asked me to write the name down just in case his current anosmia one day passes.

As for his friend, an intelligent, gentle, environmentalist named Federico, for some reason, rather than going for a soft, subtle perfume to match what I imagine his personality to be, I took some strange gambles that to my delight, really paid off: half-jokingly I suggested he try Micallef’s pissy, glinting Aoud, and to my amusement and his wide-eyed pleasure, it smelled absolutely perfect on him, losing all undesirable aspects and just smelling shining, sexy, and male Arab-rich. On the other arm we tried Montale’s Aoud Lime, but it was a little thin, and then –  bingo once more – Le Labo’s smoky Patchouli 24 (‘would you like to try some roast ham?‘) which he also fell in love with. It looks like Federico definitely wants both these scents now: he left with a decant of the Aoud but is going after them both on the internet. I don’t know why I chose such powerful, eccentric perfumes, but sometimes the gentle need a roar for balance, and on this occasion my instincts turned out to be right.

Venus, a hilariously gregarious investment banker from Singapore who is already a perfume lover and knows her stuff, relived her past with my vintage Paco Rabanne Ténéré (an unusual musty rose masculine I have yet to review), but when I see someone who is not remotely afraid to cross the gender line I know I am in good company. However, although Sisley’s grass-green Eau De Campagne did smell very good on her (and, in keeping with the green theme, she did something really rather outré, eating some Italian parsley and coriander and, saying ‘ wow, this is just like a perfume, try this’: came towards both me and Duncan and blew this perfume into our mouths like a kiss, and yes, it did in fact smell quite lovely and was also strangely thrilling in the context of Japan, where no-one would do such a bold and spontaneous thing); aside that, for some reason, I was stumped; she said FIND ME SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL AND FLORAL but I just couldn’t rise to the occasion.

HOWEVER, I did, near the end of this explosive perfumestraganza, find Moe, a beautiful, self-contained girl who goes to the same Butoh Japanese dance class as D, not just a perfume she liked, but a perfume she utterly adored; that she totally and completely fell for, and oh how I love these moments.

Looking at her glowing there contentedly on the tatami mats I thought Polynesia:  coconut nectar on a softly thighing beach, and so we tried a combination of Guerlain’s lovely Ylang Vanille and Yves Rocher’s Noix de Coco on her left wrist and hand, and, to be honest, she smelled like heaven.

On the other hand, on a whim, I tried Givenchy’s leathery floriental Ysatis, which smelled a touch mature but which we also liked, and on the top of the left arm, to go in totally different direction, some vintage Sisley Eau du Soir, which she tamed too much I thought, taking out its venomous, witchy sting (that one smells MUCH better on The Black Narcissus, I adore that perfume).

Yes, she liked them. But I wasn’t quite satisfied, and kept thinking and looking. And then: there it was – a phial of Love By Kilian, hiding itself behind some old bottles, a perfume I always quite liked but which on me just becomes a blob fest of amorphous sweetness. However, I could tell from her skin, which drinks perfumes up and purifies them (my skin does the opposite – I skankify them, bringing out all the base notes), yes but Moe, for sure,  was the opposite, and I saw that Kilian hiding up there and I knew –  yes, this has the potential to be amazing (and she said afterwards that my eyes lit up as I presented it to her, full of ridiculous excitement) and, to your unsurprise and  to our mutual delight, it was.

ABSOLUTE.PERFECTION.

A poetic, human meringue.

Light; hovering, sweet, but not too sweet, alive delectable

OH MY GOD I LOVE, LOVE THIS, she said, thrilled, where can i get it where can i get some i have to buy some of this, so there we were, searching on the internet for that extortionately priced elixir, but she is just going to save for it – she needs this perfume