Along with Naomi Campbell !
Wish it was me on the cover but you know that Naomi looks better in that tight-fitting dress.
Monthly Archives: April 2019
THE DREAMING ::;::::::::MELODIE DE L’AMOUR, ISSARA, SILLAGE BLANC, ERAWAN, OUDH INFINI + SPLENDIRIS by PARFUMS DUSITA (2015-19)
“It’s true that man should not give in to the dream, but without it, what is life?”
This poem, by Thai poet Montri Umavijani, father of the perfumer and founder of Parfums Dusita, Paris, Pissara Umavijani, in its simplicity, and philosophical profundity, really speaks to me. You might even say my life is based on this push and pull, as is D’s, for sure, as is many people’s ( but not everyone: I feel certain that a majority of people are more rooted, and contented, in ‘reality’…… there are some of us certainly more lost to dreams, or ‘giving in’ to that impulse to escape into anywhere other than hard facts, railway tracks, and the ticking of the clock.
Les Parfums Dusita specifically promote Siamese influences in their creations ( I would actually like to interview the owner and maker of the perfumes to ask her specifically about this ); my own knowledge of Thailand is limited to a trip we made to Bangkok and the island of Ko Samui over twenty years ago; a wooden hut on the beach; mosquito nets, the warm waves lapping at the bottom of the submerged poles; the brilliant gold of the royal temples; coconut milk straight from the cool warm source.
Other things : Thai food, which I adore – one of the only cuisines to stir both the appetite and the loins simultaneously (some French dishes share this attribute, interestingly) ; thinking about this piece I found myself wondering how relevant a link there might between food and perfume ( I had some jasmine and orange blossom yoghurts the other day that blurred the lines quite beautifully ). If British traditional food is simple, plain, pleasing, but unadorned, then Floris, Penhaligon’s, Woods Of Windsor, Yardley and the like perhaps share perfumed characteristics; France, with its rich, complex sauces, has the eroticism of Dior and Guerlain; Italy more vivacious, tasty, easily satisfying – something I find to be true of many Italian perfumeries like Santa Maria Novella, Profumum, I Speziali Fiorentini and so on; and this with its perturbingly satisfying fermented fish sauce bases; chillis, fresh herbs and spices, you can’t help wondering if some of the very pungent aromatic elegance of Thai traditional food will find its way into Dusita.
But first back to dreams. I have written about this before, but one of my very favourite film directors is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme D’Or in 2010 for his exquisite Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ( Duncan did past life regression at the weekend ……… more on that later ); a slow moving immersion of cinematic poetry that takes you to places you have never been to before nor thought of going ( that is, if you can stay awake: many – finding his films plotless and excruciatingly low paced, cannot). I am / we are the opposite : as Duncan lay sweating in a delirious fever in Laos I wrote about the film Tropical Malady, which for me is one of the best films ever made; on Sunday night we were lost in Blissfully Yours, his second film; in hospital, this time two years ago as I lay recovering from my leg operation and the extraordinary trauma of it all, for both of us, as we watched his beautifully serene and strange film Cemetery Of Splendour, the wind outside blowing the curtain gently, mirroring the same scene in hospital, a man with injured legs, with a visitor ( both of us in pale green pyjamas), the breeze blowing in through the curtains in his room, it felt like some kind of passageway into another world : mystifying, yet cleansing and purifying.
All of the films I have seen so far by Apichatpong Weerasethakul deal with reincarnation, in which spirits live side by side with the living, come back to visit us, or we are suddenly plunged into remembrances of being a Laotian princess from centuries before, being ravished by a catfish; or in the case of Cemetery Of Splendour, soldiers with a catatonic sleeping sickness are fighting battles in other realms, other centuries, a deep belief in other rooms, other lives, which is apparently how many Thai people experience reality.
To preface perfume reviews with all this might seem indulgent and perverse (forgive me if that is so : my reality is not so good at the moment : I have found, and am finding, the adaptation from the surreal thrill of everything that happened in London to the isolated timetable of my peripatetic loneliness unacceptable – something is going to have to change; I have reached a crossroads and feel slightly as though I were drowning ), but Parfums Dusita itself is based, it seems to me, on similar ideas, about giving, or not giving, into the dream; Pissara’s father, a wanderer who condensed his experiences into encapsulated poetry, apparently, according to one quote I found, had similar feelings about identity to the ones that I do:
He said there were two kinds of journeys, from the familiar to the strange, and from the strange to the familiar, and some of the perfumes I have sampled by Dusita do definitely make me feel like this:
Melody De L’Amour, a ravishing white floral with an animalic, woody finish – all tuberose, gardenia, honey, Indian jasmine and Mona Nuit Noire sultriness, is quite something: tenderly erotic, potent yet refined- the passion of the above poem suited to its colouring in of emptiness and the void of nothingness ( I often feel at the moment ); Oudh Infini, again, connects a very rude core – on certain days, the sheer animal of the Laos Oud Palao base is simply shocking, not suitable for society, and yet at others I have understood the poem, which I don’t have to hand – I am on the train, speeding across the countryside to my evening’s teaching assignation, and might not even be able to finish this; it may have to be a two-parter – one moment in the early morning there was indeed a beautiful, noble freshness that aligned with the poetic line about a streak of silver in the morning light painting the whole sky shining gold….
I talked before about the relation of food to perfume, and if there is one. The umami, bodyliness that lies at the base of many Thai dishes: it does seem that this perfumer is specifically seeking a sublimation of erotic impulses almost hidden within her perfumes, an aspect of her style I like on the whole for its forthrightness but cannot necessarily carry off convincingly on myself. The new Splendiris, for me, has some similarities in terms of its musky, cedarwood base notes to both Melodie D’Amour and Oudh Infini – but I think I prefer my irises more plaintive and unsullied.
Issara, a fresh, musky hay scent with vetiver, sage, pine needles and other wood notes, smells absolutely gorgeous on the D and he might even get himself a bottle: sensual yet fresh, it reminds me a little of how he used to be in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male back in the nineties, a very natural, warm masculinity with the ideal sillage.
Erawan, a darker, greener masculine based on vetiver and clary sage, is spikier and dark; resonant, like the lovers entering the jungle at night in Tropical Malady and transforming into mythical beasts. There is an interesting music to this scent, even though I am not the world’s biggest clary sage fan ( as some friends of mine know – and you are probably reading this; drinking alcohol and inhaling this herb together can be deleterious to the mind; it can even make you go a bit nuts ( but no details, please ); I probably wouldn’t wear this one for that very reason – the clary sage is quite prominent here – but I do find it original and intriguing.
Of the ones I have tried so far, probably the marvelous Sillage Blanc is the one I would wear most easily myself. In my notes to myself I wrote that it is
‘like vintage Paco Rabanne Pour Homme and vintage Cabochard de Gres parfum meeting in space and falling in love ‘
with this perfume the possible progeny; a gorgeously dry, green and powdery patchouli chypre with an excellent scent trail that brings to mind the classical French perfumery that Pissarra Umivijani obviously respects, and is channelling, yet through a modern, and quite different, thoughtful, fragrant consciousness.
To be continued..
Filed under Flowers
ALL OVER MYSELF ::::::::: CRISTAL Pour Homme by AMOUAGE
On Monday morning at Strawberry Fields in Kamakura I had a naughtyish splurge on a cache : for sixty pounds sterling, a vintage 30ml Opium parfum, a No 19, a Caron Fleurs De Rocaille extrait, but these were kind of thrown in, really, because the real purchase, and prize, was this vintage edition of Amouage Cristal for men ( or possibly Gold? Experts please weigh in ) that was roaring to me silently from the top of the glass shelf.
The bottom of the bottle says Cristal, apparently a rare perfume on eBay that sells for around 1,000 dollars – the Japanese internet has one for half that
but the notes do seem to match those of Gold, an intense ( though this word doesn’t do it justice, not remotely ; I have never known anything like it ), aldehydically animalic, musky soapy floral that smells just like a pristine extract of Madame Rochas parfum on United Arab Emirates steroids and cristillated to spectacularly nuclear strength.
************************************
The second I sprayed this oily, golden slick of perfume on the back of my hand I experienced a delirium tremens of being enveloped, head to toe, in regal downiness and flowers; rose, jasmine, but most specifically a powdery sandalwood and overall smell that reminded me very specifically of Imperial Leather soap – which I have always loved, and can use up a whole bar of in one long sitting…………….despite the swirl of richness gradually coalescing into one skin smell, the overall feeling is definitely that familiar scent; I use the talc and the deodorant spray, and having this too as the main event after all that initial background pampering will be orgiastically pleasurable for me. I was practically WRITHING on the train back home in olfactory arousal: tending and loosening like a cat in heat …… perhaps the sublimated civet, that I experience without consciously sensing it: some secret code of sensuality immersed in the blend that makes it just so horny yet so MAJESTIQUE.
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To me, anyway.
D was having none of it.
“it smells……. pissy, or something” he said when we met in Ofuna : “I don’t like it”.
“UGH”.
And on Basenotes :
“Musky, soapy floral, like taking a bath in the clawfoot tub of my gtandmother’s house in the seventies “
says one reviewer.
“I got through the initial blast of granny’s partially soiled bloomers, tiptoeing around the house trying to avoid my wife”,
says another.
Most other reviewers spin variations on this ‘old lady’ incontinence theme ( WHICH I DON’T GET AT ALL ::: I JUST SMELL SWOONWORTHY ARAB PRINCES IN WHITE ROBES )
– an (ageist, sexist ?), scaredy-cat reaction to a man’s scent that veers from the usual, ‘masculine’ brutality? Or maybe Duncan is right after all and I am just blind : though he does like the beginning, which is glorious: derailingly erotic for me personally, there is something in the base he can’t abide. A grimacing recoil. It almost makes me fearful, like some dreaded halitosis I am unaware of, that my olfactory apparatus has gone awry. Why does it smell like that to him ??????
As another reviewer of the perfume says, (as I mentioned I think this perfume must be Gold, (though please correct me if I am wrong) / could the ‘cristal’ on the glass be just referring to the material of which the bottle is made? It does feel ludicrously expensive]]
Yes. That was what I was wanting to say.
Wow is precisely the word I would use to describe this extravagant creation.
Which obviously I am only going to be able to wear indulgently alone, doors locked and bolted ,at home.
Filed under amber floral musks, Antidotes to the banality of modern times, Civet, Classics, Floral Aldehydes, FUCK EVERYTHING, Hairy Masculines, LUXURIANCE, Masculines, Musk, New Beginnings, occasionally sickening scents, PERFUME AND PERFORMANCE, pigs, postcards from the edge, Powder, Psychodrama, Urine
rotting datura
How nice to have a weekend free after surviving six days on the trot :; yesterday at home with wine and cooking and an 80’s kitchen disco, blissfully listening to all those old 12” singles we lugged at backbreaking maximum weight from England to Japan.
Today, en route from Kannai station down Isezakicho street to our favourite Thai restaurant, Im Aroy, Japanese jasmine perfume already in the bag; Thursday, here I also picked up a pristine Ricci Capricci velvet-boxed parfum for virtually nothing, and there will be more later – we passed these dangling, perfumed atrocities that I immediately recognized as Hell’s Bell’s, Devil’s Weed, or Datura, one of the absolute poisinest plants in the natural world, psychotropic to the max, leading to hypothermia, convulsions, visions, and death (and probably easy to just slip into someone’s tea).
I grasped and inhaled one of the non-decomposing flowers pictured, and it smelled beautiful – literally intoxicating, and much closer to Serge Lutens’ Datura Noir than I had ever realized
Filed under Flowers
Cherryade and the fluff: G de ROMEO GIGLI (1994) + DIAMONDS AND RUBIES by ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1993)
via Cherryade and the fluff: G de ROMEO GIGLI (1994) + DIAMONDS AND RUBIES by ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1993)
April 13, 2019 · 11:06 am
FROM A DISTANCE : COLONIA SANDALO by ACQUA DI PARMA (2016)
Most current perfumes featuring ‘sandalwood’ have what is to me a rather sharp, metallic, ‘endocrinic’ edge, or twang; that synthetic santal preparation that is a boon to the bank accounts of niche perfumery as everybody else seems to love it except me – I still yearn for the real thing, the more mystical resonance of bark.
Most men’s fragrances these days (and they are almost always ‘woody’) have a poreless intensity to them – a ballast of bludgeoning opacity that you, or at least I, contrary to their intended purpose, find myself wanting to flee rather than go up close.
I like a proper sillage, a trail of scent that you occasionally catch on the air, a brain and nasal dialogue with yourself on how much you are enjoying another person’s smell, what it is, what it conveys, the aesthetics.
Some perfumes have a ‘disappearing act’ built into their olfactory DNA. A-now-you-see- me-now-you-don’t, a hide and seek. A guessing game. Not being a perfumer, nor knowing anything whatsoever about chemistry, I have no idea how this is technically achieved, but I do know that possibly the best example of this curious phenomenon was when the D once wore Hermes’ Poivre Samarcande in Berlin; most of the time I couldn’t smell it when I was standing next to him, but could occasionally smell it powerfully across the street: strangers would come up to him in a bar, turned on and intrigued by the almost villainous aroma invisibly circulating around him and wanting to know what it was, and yet it would sometimes disappear, and then reappear, at unpredictable intervals. Up close, though, you would hardly know it was there.
Dariush gave me a bottle, in London, of Acqua Di Parma’s Colonia Sandalo Concentree, a sturdy, almost grave, unsweetened, very dignified, and yet somehow quite mysterious sandalwood scent that is very different from your standard niche contemporary fragrance of this type (all creamy, buttery, sweaty, and ‘sexy’). No – sometimes I really enjoy a more controlled scent that keeps you at a distance, yet draws you in, and I decided on this occasion (redistributing the pleasure), to give this one to D’s father- who wears the original Acqua Di Parma Colonia Intensa very well, as I had an instinctive feeling that with his pale skin type, it would work well on him.
It works marvellously. At the end of our trip, when the family picked us up at Norwich station, I kept catching, even before we got in the car, an orthodox, precise, yet softly sensual, powdered, straight, dark aroma on the air (the sandalwood is mixed with lavender, cardamom, tonka bean and citruses – there is nothing sweet or floral, the overall feeling very English rather than Italian). Up close, from the bottle, I had found the perfume too condensed and powerful – there is an ‘amber’ note in the base that I would never personally take to – but back at the house, too, in the living room as we drank tea and ate cake on the sofa,the scent trail of this perfume was great : every time Rod would go out of or come back into the room, I would catch a drift of a presciently constructed wood perfume that took me back in some ways to my beloved original Crabtree & Evelyn Sandalwood – one of the only sandalwood scents of this genre that I have ever worn convincingly. Di Parma’s Sandalo is very dry, anhydrous – but in a good way. Clean. Blameless. Wholesome, but not aseptic (when I went back into the living room a few minutes after we had gone into the kitchen to have dinner, I even thought that Daphne had possibly lit some Indian sandalwood incense -in the space …….. the scent was floating in the room, in the air, like invisible smoke). Though some may find its formula too conservative, not obviously, nor sufficiently sandalwood, to me, this perfume is a shapeshifting presence, with a quiet, deeply santalian essence at the base that pulls me in : an understated, yet curiously penetrating, exemplar of gentlemanly refinement.
Filed under Sandalwood, Woods
THE PROMENADE OF THE DAMNED: : : : : :: :WHEN YOU WEAR A PERFUME YOU HATE
I woke up through a tunnel of nightmares on Saturday morning and opened my eyes. Duncan had gone in to work for the opening ceremony of the school year; I had to get myself together for the evening’s performance.
Meeting Lona in a park to practice our moves, described with great precision by D in his notes (almost impossible for a person like me, who possibly has dyspraxia – a horrific clumsiness, as any of my friends or family members would vouch: a virtual lack of coordination and spatial awareness (which is why I would never drive – it would lead to death)) ……….I can’t even remember one part of dance choreography, nor get left and right correctly)) We nevertheless went through the instructions, like Japanese junior high school students doing their hip hop routines unselfconsciously in municipal areas for hours, to get them right
D then eventually turned up, reeking of, and drenched in, Rose Jam by Lush, a perfume I know he hates, passionately (when he hates a perfume there is always a visceral revulsion and rejection which begs the question why on earth he was wearing this sticky, Turkish rose, geranium and honey perfume that is like plunging your tongue into dollops of sickly sweet Russian rose jam in rice pudding smeared on somebody’s body)………………….well, the piece, based on an inscrutable poem called The Promenade Of The Damned, had we, the handmaidens – though I felt somewhat more Anglo-Saxon than ancient Greek, more like a disrobed courtier from Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite – burning candle wax onto his laurelled head, and rose petals (drenched in Nahema); blowing glitter (he is still sparkling this morning); we came on bearing a pictorial representation of the sun, and a hand (Icarus), and rakes on either side, a bit grim reaper:: you could feel a slight hush and murmur in the audience as the first bit of visual stimulation of the night changed the sphere; ;;;;D coming in in a chameleon’s head and doing a slow motion flight towards being burned (and he had wanted a literal rose scent to augment the feeling in the room, seen a perfume with rose in the name back home as he panickedly tried to get his things together in the suitcase and come up to Tokyo, having forgotten, somehow (I never would have) that this was a perfume, that for him (and me, actually – just too potent and cloying), is very, very wrong.
In England I had secretly scented his coat with two perfumes: on the collar, too much 1899 by Histoires De Parfums, an aromatic spice very redolent of fresh tobacco (in homage to Ernest Hemingway), one of a few perfumes I bought there, for D, as he loves tobacco perfumes, the other being a lavender for my mother, and a full bottle of Fragonard’s delectably lascivious amber, Reve Indien, which out shalimars Shalimar in its civety richness (gorgeous); I had also borrowed Daphne’s Santa Maria Novella Patchouli for radio interviews and surreptitiously lined his coat with it, at the base, at the back. Now this is a classic patchouli, brilliant, tightly made, but it did, on this woollen coat, smell pungent as hell, and still continues to do so; right now, the earthy, musky scent of the entrails of patchouli in its driest death throes trails him like a long unwashed hippie, the balsams of the 1899 still lingering like sex on dirty sheets; the cloying erotica of his detested rose jam almost making me quite embarrassed last night, post performance, as we tried to find somewhere to eat : nowhere would have been suitable, I knew this: people in restaurants would have been repelled by how strong we smelled – – – – I had also rather overdone the Nahema – we smelled like an orgy of roses and dirt musk, most definitely enigmatic and troubling; but also, quite possibly, quite disgusting.
BLANK SLATE ::::::::::: SESAME CHAN by ANIMA VINCI (2018) + MUGLER COLOGNE : LOVE YOU ALL (2018) + ALL ABOUT THE BOOK LAUNCH AND MY STRANGE, INTENSE, TRIPLE LIFE
Sometimes it is difficult to distill experiences into words. Especially when they have been among the most intense and memorable of your life (this post might take several chapters; or alternatively, realistically, as time gets swallowed up in the living of the regular week, not even amount to much at all – yesterday I went back to work, shaved my beard off, and became someone I am not again, with all the damage that entails to the body and the soul). The flight home was exhausting, memories gestating in my head, the bifurcation of cultures, the rabbit hole of my existence.
England was fantastic. It was great to have our own pad in Pimlico to slink back to this time, rather than carting suitcases on the underground and half-sleeping on other people’s sofas (those days are gone: I am too old). It meant we could retreat and conserve energy. And wake up on white, Georgian streets, and see England with new eyes. Night taxis past the Houses Of Parliament and the London Eye; gliding silently past midnight clad in new perfumes to demarcate new experience: I had been given a bottle of a perfume by Anima Vinci, and also something entirely not me (and yet me: I wore it in great profusion……after meeting Monsieur and Madame Persolaise for a catch up at an Indian restaurant, though exhausted from the night before – the launch and the gathering afterwards – there was one more assignation to Dalston to go to the house of one Lyall Hakaraia : a fascinating creature from New Zealand who lives in permanently flower drenched air, on this occasion an almost suffocating pleasure of lilies, hyacinths and tuberoses, his own club in the basement – Femmetopia – but it was too cold for me to dance; my heating needs are now beyond reptilian – Garrick, the host of the party where I played with Anne Pigalle (did I really?) there, resplendent in what looked like black Issey Miyake……it felt like a stage set, I was in The Matrix, Lyall in silk Japanese dressing gown, classical music coming from Radio 3 as they waited for JT Leroy, who was staying there and drinking at a pub around the corner………(surreal).
I had been unable to bear the smell of all the fried onions on my clothes, to the extent that I couldn’t even wear my coat (death for me): instead I had had an emergency shower and different, boring clothes, and sick of bloody No 19, which I have been signaturing all over the shop, felt like a new skin: : :: Mugler’s Love You All sprayed all over me like a waterfall: all steamed, laundry fresh ultramodern neroli and probably lime and the most innocuous, almost angelic, white musks, for that moment it felt strange but absolutely right, and our host made motions of pleasure as he inhaled me brushing past, climbing the stairs away from the revellers in the basement to the unbelievable florality of the reeking fleurs du mal of the living room and kitchen where we sipped neat Zubrowka vodka and rambled coherently about all kinds of nonsense until it was suddenly 3am and we had to leave in order not to miss our morning trains.
Back home at my parents’, I was completely drawn to wearing Anima Vinci’s delicious Sesame Chan, a perfume of extreme, soothing comfort that fits me like a glove and is my new favourite scent. Those that like Hermes’ Vetiver Tonka will in all likelihood also like this warm gourmand based on vetiver with delicately balanced notes of ginger, hazelnut, cereals, sesame and an eventual base note of pure, soft vanilla……I was LOVING myself on the train ride home, past fields of green, lost in thought and a novel, constantly aware of the aura around me: sweet, but not too much so, fresh, light, yet long lasting and completely pleasurable ; for me this is a perfectly blended comfort blanket and I am going to wear it today in Tokyo as well (tonight, in a sharp reverse from yesterday’s dungeon of condensed office culture I am attending the launch party of a Canadian poet, Joy Waller, and her first published book of poetry, Pause: Heartbeat, at which a range of foreign Tokyoites are going to interpret some of her works, including Duncan, who will be Icarus, and myself and Lola his Grecian tormentors (Burning Bush in a sack and a rake….I am getting whiplash just thinking about it: sometimes I feel that my own life is happening beyond my authorisation and I just watch it salaciously).
It was somewhat similar at the Launch party. The day before, I had been on BBC Radio London, live, which was a terrifying experience (have I already talked about this? probably), but it was so heightened and heartbeaty arriving at Broadcasting House, getting through all the levels of security, going up to Jo Good’s floor, where she was doing her show, talking about all kinds of things: Brexit, the price of tuna steaks, Neil Chapman’s perfume book – and feel free to call in and ask him any questions about fragrance! I am also going to ask him to guess what I am wearing…….as I sat in the lobby, knowing that I would be on after the news and a song::: holding my bag o ‘ perfumes close to me, knowing I would be talking live and having absolutely no idea how it would turn out…Neil you are on in five; Neil you can come in now, as the new single by Bananarama was playing – who were being interviewed after me – I now wished I could have hung around a bit longer and met them as I used to love their early stuff, but I was already being ushered out at that point, the fifteen minutes having gone by so quickly. Ms Good was a lovely woman; really enthusiastic, and she loved the fact that I had taken so many scents in for her to try. I found myself quite enjoying myself by the end, getting into my stride.
It all took its nerve toll, though, and although D and his parents came round in the evening, fresh from the Norwich bus and staying at the Windermere Hotel next door to hear me on the radio – like families gathering around the wireless in the 1940’s there was something very special and beautiful about this, my mum having also called up having just got back from the hairdresser’s, hearing something about tuna steaks and then not being able to believe her son was on the radio, she and dad gathered around the computer back home……
The next day though I had to be alone to get my act together for the evening. The Launch.
There are times in your life that you know are going to be defining moments. And this was definitely one of them (hopefully not the apex, but who knows? Perhaps this was my small moment). Whatever it was, it involved people from my life coming together – ‘characters’ from my book : girls, women from the past -(and present, we are still in contact) Rebecca, Natasha, Julianne, Julia, of course Helen, but in the flesh – friends from university I hadn’t seen for twenty five years (Lesley! Artemis, it was divine to see you, seriously), my family, and Duncan’s – plus The Perfume Society, hosted by Jo Fairley, who had just rushed across London fresh from winning a Jasmine Award, and though I have realised that in truth I am not entirely comfortable with eyes and attention on me (hence not wanting to teach any more – at times I feel violated by it: : :I get more and more sensitive as I get older, not less – I thought it was meant to be the opposite); this was different: in essence a celebration. The book, with its gold-embossed pages, was piled up on a table near the entrance. The handsome duo of my cousin Dominic and his husband Scott arrived (both architects/ designers) and seemed quite taken with it; there was Mrs Dalloway from The Black Narcissus too, and Catherine, standing shyly in a corner (very nice to meet you!), Samantha from I Scent You A day, with a friend (so sorry we didn’t get to properly talk: it was like that with everyone though: I was jealous of people being able to just relax and have conversations): Emma we hardly spoke at all, which I regret: Rachel and Sally, hardly at all either (sorry!): a lovely Japanese lady who has given me some introductions to perfume people in Tokyo (I am trying to get a Japanese co-edition put out for the small but passionate fragrance lovers of this city), all kinds of people, but in truth within the swirl of the champagne and the food – which I didn’t touch, weird for me I didn’t even get a chance to relieve my bladder- and with everything going on I had to be interviewed in front of everyone and read from the book, and I was not entirely present. At the time, or immediately afterwards, I couldn’t even remember anything I said: : afterwards I realised that despite feeling like the heaviest person in the world, heavier than lead, an animated corpse jolted by electric batteries to come alive and say something, as though I was rallying myself and battening down to the primal basics, eventually I started flowing; Jo was down to earth, relaxed and saying very nice things about the book, and I let my eccentricities out – I do remember quite a few times that people were laughing.
I signed books – by the end of the event there were none left, or maybe one (Georgia, I can’t believe you bought four, or was it five?) and we all piled next door to a cocktail bar, where everyone met and talked and the time went in no time in a blur of booze and love, and we found ourself in yet another taxi going home.
So: the book is out. It came out in America on April 2nd. There have been some extremely glowing reviews from The Perfume Society, Persolaise, I Scent You A Day, Australian Perfume Junkies, The Fragrant Wanderer, and Old Herbaceous (thanks very much), all of which I am so delighted with, – you never know how things will be received,) so it does seem that my crazed and pressurised labours of last year were not in vain. I expect the intense and touching memories will eventually decompact themselves and I may write more on all of this again, but for now I have to get ready for Duncan’s piece tonight, again on stage: : what has happened to me! Am I an extroverted introvert or the other way round: (how about you?). His piece, based on another’s poem, on the intense desire to escape life, or at the very least reality. Which, ultimately, in many ways, is what my book is basically about. The desire for beauty, and the transcendental.
The reviews:
https://thefragrantwanderer.wordpress.com
https://perfumesociety.org/delve-into-the-best-perfume-book-weve-read-in-years/
https://iscentyouaday.com/2019/03/22/perfume-in-search-of-your-signature-scent-by-neil-chapman/
http://persolaise.blogspot.com/2019/03/persolaise-review-perfume-in-search-of.html
https://scentsandsensibilities.co/category/books-i-like/
The Black Narcissus 