First off, I forgot to tell you who the Menardo winner was from two weeks back. It was you, Joan. Expect an email asking for your address sometime soon. I’ll also throw a sample of Jubilation XXV in there too.
I want to write about Jubilation XXV, but I’m holding off until incense month, aka January. My bottle should be with me today – I’ve got through 4mls in a week, so this seems like love. It’s also cured me of my incense issues – seems it was monastically dry incense that I could no longer do. I’ve talked before about how my skin needs a little sweetness in a scent or I end up desiccated. But the purchase does relate to the post, which’ll be shorter than normal – it’s Christmas frenzy over here in Suffolk, England, UK, Europe, the World, The Universe…
Put your hand up if you ever struggle to choose a scent in the morning. I know I do – some people are ritualists about this, choosing one before they go to sleep. A lovely bloke on PoL seems to rotate through his scents, giving each one its moment in the limelight. Both of these are way too systematic for me – I have to select on the mood of the moment. (Aside: did restaurants Stateside ever opt for a period where a soup starter was called ‘Soup of the Moment’? I think this was to avoid the dreary sigh of boredom that meets ‘soup of the day’, also known as ‘all our leftovers thrown into a pot with stock’. But isn’t soup of the moment truly awful? I must be getting old – I find myself constantly tut-tutting over appalling uses of language – all the time. And apologies to you if you use any of these – I even do myself because of their ubiquity – but top of my shudder list right now are ‘A big ask’ and ‘populate the document’. I know, I know, they’re effective, but the first is a dreadful grammatical shift to imply sophistication and insight through linguistic simplicity; the second a mathematical term that has broadened to mean ‘fill in’ or ‘complete’ everywhere and for everything, as though all such tasks bear the weight of genius. I’m all for linguistic play, diversity, change, and I don’t give two hoots about the dying art of the apostrophe, but the steady accretion of Businessspeak in the everyday makes my flesh creep. Though I do like those sss together like that. I might have to do a whole post on this sometime. The language thing. Not the sss.)
Where was I? Oh yes. Decisions. See my problem? So easily distracted by whatever floats through my head. I blame mono – my brain still doesn’t work like it used to, a year on. A butterfly has replaced it. Nice wings, but crap at action… So, some days I do a mental checklist of all I have and what I can wear. I have about 70 bottles. I’m trying to reduce it to 50, but finding that way too hard. There’s always new nosh in the goody bag. Then there are the hundreds of decants and samples that sometimes seem to march towards me in my dreams, a la The Sorceror’s Apprentice, demanding to be worn. They’re lucky to be used as air fresheners or linen scenters, the poor fools. All in all this means that I easily feel overwhelmed by variety, the superfluity of scent chez moi. Like when I first got digital, I constantly flicked through channels, never settling on one for longer than a few minutes. I watched the shopping channels as happily as a costume drama or the news – all merged into one. Sometimes, I fear my plethora of choice is destroying my sense of taste and refinement in what I love, though I know that isn’t true, at least in the long run. I’m back to the hour or two of TV a day, and only quality (or what I claim is quality, and don’t you dare challenge me on it). And it’s not as if I wear Vera Wang for Men (sorry to the two fans of this beast).
Right now, as I type these words, I’m scentless. Yes that’s right. Pass the smelling salts would you. A couple of our more neurasthenic readers are a little too overcome by my statement. Pass them back to me afterwards please. I never know when I might need them myself. In fact, whole days can pass unscented, due to a failure to decide. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I doin’t want to wear scent, it’s just that I need to CHOOSE THE RIGHT ONE. I tell you, it can get downright debilitating. As yet, I seem to have found no cure.
So, do you also suffer from this psychopathology? If so, how do you get round it or over it? Or alternatively, have you just learned to live with it? Answer me please…
The first image is Vincent Price as Roderick Usher. It seemed appropriate. The second is a scentaholic who’s just been told that her latest purchase will be held up for a week. You know you’ve been there.
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