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Yesterday was what we call sailor-hat day in the town where we live: the day when graduating high-school students wearing naval-style caps parade round the streets celebrating on impromptu floats bedecked with birch-boughs.
As I recall, my last day at school was a much lower-key affair: we did pretty much nothing, and went home at lunchtime. There was a celebration of sorts on the day our exam results came through: a few of us gathered in the Royal Arms on High Street and spent the afternoon drinking. I had at least one bottle of 1080 cider too many (do they even still make that stuff?) and felt obliged to vomit in an alleyway while staggering home.
My university graduation made for more of a show: I donned a batcape & mortar-board and was handed my certificate on-stage at the Royal Albert Hall, with my mother, father and sister all in the audience. That night a bunch of us got stoned at the flat in Wimbledon where I’d lived until a couple of months before, and I slept, though barely, on the floor in the lounge.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon—Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat.
To me, as a child, quince might just as well have been as much a made-up word as runcible: I had never seen such a thing, much less dined on slices of one. Last year, in one of the local supermarkets, I spotted jars of kvitten marmelad (‘quince marmelade’), and was curious to try some: I found I very much enjoyed the delicately scented flavour of this pinkish, Iranian-made preserve, runnier than what I would consider to be proper marmelade-texture, having been brought up on Robertson’s ‘Golden Shred,’ but including good-size chunks of the fruit.
Plutarch reports that a Greek bride would nibble a quince to perfume her kiss before entering the bridal chamber, “in order that the first greeting may not be disagreeable nor unpleasant”
Since then, I have tried ‘quince cheese’ aka marmelada, which I was surprised to find in our local deli, as well as a small pot of French quince jam. I think I have seen the fruits themselves in one of the out-of-town supermarkets here: I’d like to try my hand at cooking something with them.
It was for a golden quince that Atalanta paused in her race.
As a child I affected to despise perfumes, and would claim I was allergic to them: they made me want to sneeze. Ours wasn’t a family of fragrant sophisticates: my mother sometimes wore Lenthéric’s Tweed, and, later, Panache; and my father might have splashed on some Old Spice or Brut 33 before the odd night out.
Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, was an eye-opener for me: a first indication of the romance and fascination of perfumery. I must have been about seventeen when I read it. It planted seeds that were slow to germinate. I was in mid twenties before I began (intermittently) to wear cologne myself, Christmas or birthday gifts of such & such by Armani or Calvin Klein. Typically for me, it was other books, rather than aromas themselves, which aroused my interest further: Tisserand on aromatherapy, Stoddart's Scented Ape, Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant.
In Bristol, I lived near Cotham Hill, a street redolent with the smell of the half dozen Indian restaurants and takeaways that lined it, and of one shop in particular, Amphora Aromatics, a notable stockist of aromatherapy and perfume oils. Entering this store I was daunted by the magnificent array of bottles on its shelves, filled with oils and tinctures of every hue, and yet longed to possess a little of each & every one of them. The shop sounded out a truly orchestral olfactory chord that, when I close my eyes, I can still readily summon to mind.
My nose is hardly better than my part-deaf left ear, or my myopic eyes: but even so I've hankered after dabbling with a perfumer's laboratory of my own. This desire was precipitated into action after I read Mandy Aftel’s Essence and Alchemy the other week. While I mistrusted its likening of perfumery with the spagyric art, as a primer of practical perfumery it was inspirational, and prompted me to spend a good deal of money on all manner of essences and oils, in an international spree of on-line orders.
Yesterday afternoon I picked up the first of the orders I placed last week, which contained Benzoin, Bergamot, Clove Bud, Cypress, Silver Fir, Galbanum, Lime, May Chang/Litsea Cubeba, Bitter Orange, Black Pepper, Peru Balsam, Sandalwood, Costus Root, Opopanax, and absolutes of Champaca, Lavender, Oak Moss, Osmanthus, Tonka Bean and Tuberose. Tonight, all being well, I will begin experimenting…
