When my dad picked me up at Solihull station late last night after a fabulous time in London and Portsmouth (more on that later), I asked him if he had just been eating ginger nuts – the deliciously ginger tasting hard sweet biscuits that they eat every morning with their early morning tea (and which I dunk into the brew for that cheekily delectable half melt – I don’t care if it makes me a pleb) : : : but then, as the powerful, not smell, not hallucination – maybe holographic brain insertion (all I could smell was ginger nut biscuits and I thought that the car was choc-a-bloc full of them, even though I knew that this was an impossibility), my head began to reach further.
It couldn’t fool me. IT also was so familiar: what was this? I knew this smell. Had a perfume leaked? (I was so laden down with samples and bottles and goodies that one bag had completely broken on the platform at Leamington Spa; had I, in my typical clumsy oaf non spatial awareness just thrust it down onto the concrete and damaged one of my preciousnesses without realising? Oh so plausible an explanation. ) But it felt internally familiar. A comforting sediment. In my psyche. And then I became aware that what I was smelling was very similar indeed to the perfume I made when I came back from Java -(called, imaginatively, Java- please read my review) :: : :: all cacao, coffee, patchouli,and cardamom: distinctly similar: : : and then I realised, oh no, has the Gorilla Perfumes Cardamom Coffee I picked up at Persolaise’s (jesus the man is generous), a scent I liked immediately as I love cardamon so much – D and I never drink tea without it, sometimes with fresh ginger as well – you can’t beat it – has it leaked?
-At this point my head was so full of ginger nuts though,:: : my head had become a ginger nut: I could hardly think straight, my dad was speaking ginger nut
– hauling my load into the house as my parents went to bed, I knew that this was one of the intensest perfume experiences of my life. As I emptied the ruined bag and saw the smashed bottle in the bottom corner, the glass pulverised like sugar crystals, with not a drop remaining, I saw that a full thirty millilitres of this pungent, sweet, chocolatey spice drink had been unnaturally liberated from its thick, chunky confines and had filled the entire car and house. Like chemical warfare (but the very best kind). The gingerest, cardamomest (because the oil really did come through, clearly, once I saw it), biscuitest, smellfest I have ever had. An amazing thing to go through actually. ALL IN ONE GO. Because much as I was disappointed by the loss – this would make a really lovely wintery comfort perfume and I would also have enjoyed spritzing it round the house for a perfect, ersatz, Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house bonanza – the sheer, diluvial pleasure of such a huge wave of ginger (because it does smell like ginger, like ginger confectionery), all at once, was like a sugar junkie or the ultimate ginger nut enthusiast having the best, purest, and most ecstatic hit of his life
The Black Narcissus 