Author Archives: ginzaintherain

I am sick of sampling disgracefully overpriced and overblown niche perfumes that smell like shit. Sometimes I simply want something that just feels good and easy; is well made, hopefully with a wisp of the poetic (‘functionality’ doesn’t interest me), and if possible, a little intrigue and depth – a scent that you can spray on and feel happy in as you make your way through the day.

A couple of weekends ago a friend of mine presented me with this very pleasing and affordable edt, which she had picked up while back in Liverpool over the summer at Marks & Spencer : that beloved British institution, frequented by so many Brits- my sister lives in there for food shopping – if with a reputation for a certain dowdiness of stiff knickers and talc for peach granny’s birthday (it would always be extremely difficult for M & S for ever to be considered cool). Still, I was somehow quite shocked to discover that we no longer have one back in my hometown – the overly-venerated towering John Lewis department store having rendered it redundant and financially unviable during the pandemic. It felt strangely scandalous to me that it had closed down: I think that I might miss it.

At £34.00 for 100ml, Patchouli by Fragonard, available in the fragrance section at M & S, is, in my view, a really excellent bargain. It soothes and appeals, with an undertone of elegantly presented eroticism. It feels neat. Held together. I even rather like the watercolour design on the box – obviously, cheapness usually does dilute aesthetics- and aesthetics do mean a lot to me in terms of perfume collecting -but the design here is quite good. I can live with this.

Interestingly, Sarah’s Japanese husband Keisuke – who I have given woody perfumes to in the past- had detested this fresh and soft, biscuity dark tonka-bean patchouli so thoroughly on her that he refused to be in the same house: to him, it just smelled musty and old in all the wrong ways, reminding him too much of earlier eras in Japanese history and depressing grandchild smells. Repulsed. A no go. Quite dismaying. She therefore kindly decided to give the perfume to me, though she still liked it – and so did I — the very second I sniffed it from the bottle.

I often tend to be drawn to these more ‘artisanal’ French and Italian brands : the kind of boutiques you find dotted in little towns in the hills of Tuscany or Provence. You wouldn’t call them mainstream, niche, vintage, or natural/botanical – they occupy their own terroir: not quite as traditional as the old style colognes, not as edgy as indie, whose for the-sake-of-experimentation chemical weirdness often leaves an acrid pit in my belly, yet they are also usually more refined and pared down than the WAG-curdled boobliciousness of low level airport, which from me just usually inciter a couple of grossed-out heaves and a sneer. The far less sex-obsessed, celebrity-less, more in-the-family parfumeurs such as Fragonard, Molinard and the like, with their Grasse-rooted historical traditions of distilling local essences and then blending them, just get on quietly on a daily basis with the less conceptually-mired business of creating nice and wearable perfume.

D liked this one the second he smelled it on me. I felt great it in as well. With vestiges of 19 parfum and Givenchy Gentleman from the day before still lingering on my coat – I like both of those perfumes far better in their later stages, particularly when loitering on clothes, I instinctively knew that this generous-hearted patchouli would work in tandem. While the base accord is quite earthy, chocolatey, vetivery (not listed) and musky – it reminds me of a couple of old L’Occitanes I used to like, with a similar feel – the top notes of bitter orange, caraway and petitgrain Paraguay create a suavely delicious patchouli perfume with a hint of cedarwood and rose that gently opens up the senses. To me, the perfume feels contemporary and classical at the same time – not that I especially care about those distinctions – but I do like an aspect of ‘timelessness’ sometimes, when a scent is not quagmired in the steaming stench of PR horsedung and tired olfactory clichés, but can just play out and evaporate happily on its own natural terms. If you are like K, and cannot bear the smell of natural patchouli, then obviously stay clear of this one. If you are more like D and I, and, on occasion want an earthier number perfect for a comforting winter nuzzle; you have an M & S in your vicinity, or just feel like very lightly flexing your credit card, I do highly recommend trying this value-for-money patchouli scent – particularly at this time of the year. It is great. Thanks, Sarah. x

I must admit that I greatly admire people that can make it to the age of 80. Though longevity is reportedly in my genes, I often feel more like David Bowie in The Hunger, ageing rapidly within, way beyond my years, a bone/muscle double inheritance featuring waterworks and other issues, cognitive included, where I find myself acceleratedly and ungleefully whitewater- rapiding through to the great Pink Floydian chutes in the sky.

Simultaneously, it does truly feel that in many ways, 80 is the new 60. Biden and Trump are somewhat unbelievably the main contenders for the election next year, even if most people think they are too doddering over the hill to be taken properly seriously ( and both make me shudder ); yet both are still somewhat outrageously (and realistically )vying for the position of Most Powerful Person is the world. But then the Rolling Stones are also releasing a new record, Diana Ross (79) was headlining only recently at Glastonbury, Joan Collins is 90 and still flashing a boob and a sequin-fastenened thigh with younger beau when she gala feels like it ( as is Cher, 77 but unlikely to quit the show just because she is 80: her spirit is indomitable) and hats off to Nancy Pelosi for stalwarting her way through all manner of heinosity; it took some guts. In the artworld, Yoko Ono still rocks it mightily at 90, as does Yayoi Kusama at 94 (I once stared into her eyes at the Mori Tower in Tokyo and knew at that moment – I had naughtily strayed longer than I was supposed to and she had arrived earlier – that the black diamond madness was actually real); David Hockney is still exhibiting new paintings at 86, and I suddenly realized the other day that I have recently been out at the cinema to see films by several octogenarian auteurs I have long admired, including Dario Argento, Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg ( if Crimes Of The Future certainly wasn’t the Canadian creepoid’s best work, it still intrigued); Clint Eastwood – not my political bag but brilliant, film wise still, at 93 (how?!!! ); directors you are understandably not allowed to like ( (Woody Allen, Roman Polanski ) but whose film catalogue you vastly admire nonetheless – 87 and 90 respectively !- premiering films at Cannes ; your favourite directors like David Lynch (77) and Brian De Palma (83) still off in the jungles of Colombia trying out new aesthetics and screenplays and ideas …. … ……all of it just making you feel sometimes guilty, as I often do, for feeling clapped out (and decrepit and pathetic) at 52.

There is so much terrain still to cover.

So many energy reserves left, if you can find the life inspiration and the meaning and you still have the verve (and the nerve) to go there; slaking off the unwanted skeins of ageist received wisdom and keeping – as much as you realistically can – the physical apparatus in check . To just shake it off, like The Incredible Hulk, or the irrepressible Taylor Swift : The parameters and paradigms – in the recent, convulsively transformational decades – now seeming – at some meaningful and deeper level of human consciousness, in much of the world – to have genuinely, rightfully, changed.

In August, one day after lunch, we went back to the Packhorse Bridge Nature Reserve, a place I was apparently taken to a few times as a child, but couldn’t quite remember.

No matter. The scent on the air of the wild English orchids growing there freely on the embankments was delicately, quietly thrilling; marshmallow pink, lotus-like; surprisingly, more perfumed and sensuous than any of the perhaps more magnificent-looking flowers we saw in profusion just ten days earlier at the National Orchid Garden in Singapore.

My parents always encouraged my love of flowers as a child, and their garden, a little more overgrown than usual this year (and thus far more to my taste), was probably more beautiful than I have ever seen it. My mother may not be able to do the gardening quite as vigorously and meticulously as she used to but it is still her pride and joy. She is happiest just out in the sun, with her trowel, planting, pruning, bedding, rearranging and the organic whole is a pleasure to sit in and roam.

It was also nice to spend this gentle half hour or so together just walking in the outdoors on this unusually warm and sunny late summer afternoon as well, taking in nature with some intense emotions and nostalgic reverie; picking plants and flowers along the way from the hedgerows as we used to do as kids (both she and I collected things for our ‘nature tables’ as curious children). Fast forward five decades, with so much life passed in between, and here we all still were…

Happy 80th birthday mum xxx

It is hard to read or watch the news at the moment. Though not doing so feels wrong, I cannot go too deeply into the carnage without feeling depressed, helpless or even panicked. What can we, as individuals, do to change this situation? Some Buddhist friends of mine might say that you can only change yourself from within and that this transformation will slowly change the world, little by little – though that can surely only work as a long term philosophy. It cannot change what is currently happening in war zones right in this moment.

Though Buddhism has a long history of violence in Japan and elsewhere – you only have to look at the ethnic cleansing massacres of the minority Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar for a shocking example, right now, far away in Kamakura, I am immersing myself much more frequently than I used to in the calm and elegance of the ancient zen Buddhist former capital in which I live, with a fuller appreciation of its relative ultra-serenity. After peak hours, when it bustles with tourists both foreign and domestic , there is a very poetic and dignified atmosphere here in Autumn, a time when the city feels especially beautiful.

Earlier in the year, I injured my knee in an accident and couldn’t really exercise. It is better now, and I am enjoying just cycling about here and there, past temples and artisan shops and cafes, the trees starting to turn, the moon last night unusually large and partly hidden behind zephyr clouds. Wistful, sad in a way. Dense with religion and history.

In the afternoon, on a whim and because it was pay day, I decided to meander down to my favourite incense shop, just a minute or so from the Hachimangu shrine, where I have recently discovered the the ephemeral pleasures of niobukuro ( ‘scent bags’), delicately aerated muslin sachets containing incense and flowers, spices, herbs, perfect for indolent aesthetes, that you insert in an embroidered pouch – I chose one in ochre- and then place on your person, or in drawers, or – as the lady advised me, in a wallet, the idea being that pleasing but unplaceable scent follows you about or is released at certain moments during the day. Unlike the sharp sprays to the throat and neck of alcoholic perfumes I witnessed back in England this summer ( just too strong ! too volatile ! ), this method of perfuming is much more subtle, yet also deeper and perhaps more potent than you might initially imagine

(will continue in a minute or in my lunch break as I am now on my way to work and don’t want to lose the post as I walk along – )

My friend Michael / Belgium Solanas right now somewhere in Nagoya/ Osaka.

Image + Perfume ( especially vintage Estee Lauder ) = mindquake

I reached out for Mitsouko this morning like a vampire bride clawing at her casket. At less than the local equivalent of ten dollars, this priscilla-precious wedding gift trousseau, with its diaphanous white ribbon hinge gently opening up – a child’s music box – onto the cool white morbid satin of its quilted indent, is aesthetically off the scales for me : exceedingly beautiful (few things are more exquisite in this world than 1960’s Guerlain): I gasped when I saw it on the shelf.

The eau de toilette is perfect. Not shrewd and bitter like some Mitsoukos: a warm animalic touch of musk in the base has soft emanations of spices and flowers ceding out to the woodland sunlight of beaming bergamot essence of the top; the soap (the soap! look at the golden green chartreuse of it) taunting me to unwrap it order to savour its lather, but also, somewhat gloatingly; forbidding me to touch

I used to be paranoid about patchouli.

In Japan, I erroneously assumed that there had to be something repellent about this most husky of essences, earthy and bodily, like crumbs of old food stuck firmly in a smoker’s unkempt beard ; soil-like and buried; pernicious…insidious.

I realized, then – especially in recent times – , that natural patchouli essence is in fact everywhere. When you pass by the ‘daily incense’ section in the supermarket, stacked next to chemical cleansers and laundry detergent, the unmistakeable powdery combination of patchouli, benzoin and camphor rises up even from the cheapest blends like ghosts from the past and the present; penetrating but soothing , allusive, mysterious.

Intense, vivid and lingering patchouli oil as a perfume, or as part of aroma therapeutic spray mists and other lotions , is also a currently ubiquitous part of the Japanese urban scentscape. What I find to be a fearfully divisive perfume ingredient (patchouli-haters are among the most vociferously oppositional note-phobes in the fragrance community) clearly isn’t here in the J- city; with its inherent naturalness, deep-grounding earthiness and somewhat nerve-blunting anti-stress properties, patchouli, in its full resplendent state – not bastardized and castrated in its duty free sweet caramel popular form – despite its fuzzier, hippier connotations, often seems to denote a certain clarity.

Probably the reason why the shelf stock of this natural oil roll on (a 10% Javan patchouli in jojoba oil blend ) is fast dwindling at the only niche perfume shop I visited today in a department store in Fujisawa. It is basically everything you could want in a patchouli – the intuitively selected dilution prevents it from becoming too hoary or filth-hairy; it has the right balance of earth and sweet dryness; you can use it quite easily to bolster other perfumes ( I am fancying it in tandem with vintage Gentleman de Givenchy or the castoreum mimosa rose patchouli of the Paloma Picasso edp at an upcoming Halloween party on Sunday evening ). Personally, I find sometimes, that patchouli can grate on one’s inner aesthetics when the mood isn’t right – it can feel intrusive and neverending; rough; sick and scratchy; but when you are in the perfect state of mind to just bury yourself deeper underground, to escape everything, be at one with all its leaves and the musty foraging forest roots, a pleasingly complex but simple scent such as this one, just a little glided onto the skin, is undoubtedly the natural way to go.

I had been wanting to write about the osmanthus. About how late it was, and how strange it felt. But then the attacks on Israel, and the attacks on Gaza happened – unstomachable, brutal atrocities, so much immediate and destruction (is this the beginning ? In all probability, yes… so much to fear and dread in this situation it’s really horrible) – and it just didn’t feel right.

For the record, though, though a little dry perhaps at first, after the long hot summer when the flowers probably felt too cowed by the intense heat to open, they did, finally, two weeks later than usual, and the heady, intense, lush innocence of the white floral tangerine apricot the florets emit took you unawares; while perfuming the entire air of cities, all opening in tandem with their underground connections and hidden language, a constant, brimming smell hum of warm October, certain pockets of intenser osmanthus would make you gasp and stop in your tracks as your sad thoughts and worries about the world were suddenly interrupted, momentarily vanishing as you looked up and saw you were standing directly beneath a blossoming tree..

Last night we went to see Martin Scorcese’s new film, Killers Of The Flower Moon, a slow, dark and rivetingly poisonous epic about the deliberate eradication of Osage Nation Indians by avaricious Oklahoma oil men back in the 1920’s. Violent, beautiful and sad, as I wept quietly in my cinema seat at the end, and reflecting on it again today, I thought about how deeply, deeply regrettable and tragic it is that human beings are still so myopic and ethnocentric that they (we) can so easily dehumanize and annihilate each other without compunction, shoot bullets into each other’s heads at close range, blow people up, drive knives into the backs of others – women, babies, anyone, with such vicious ferocity and unforgivingly intense hatred.

There is no real connection between what I am writing about here, other than the fact that the Osage loved, and love a, particular flower that blossoms in vast swathes of carpeted colour in Spring, just as all cultures do flowers all over the world; the sakura cherry blossom and beloved kinmokusei / osmanthus in Japan; the roses in the Middle East. I don’t know precisely what flowers in Palestine and Israel in spring and autumn, but I fervently hope that some sense and humanity can prevail, that more precious life is not wasted in vain, that a semblance of peace is restored in the region, and that the people there, like me, will be able to just walk along and for a second or two, lose themselves contentedly in the transporting eternality of the air .