I am a ‘perfume-person’. I have always loved wearing perfume and I have always tended to find a perfume I really like and then wear it for years. This was the case with Mary Quant’s Havoc, which I wore all through my teens and early twenties, until they discontinued it. I also wore Lancome’s Poeme for a long, long time, until I tired of it and it became hard to find as it is being discontinued, too. So, I’ve been on a quest to find something I like. Today I took myself off to Lakeside – Why???? Half of Essex was there!! But I did bump into the lovely Lyn Owers who I haven’t seen for a long time and that was great.- and I ended up buying some Madame Rochas, a perfume I used to wear when I lived in Ibiza. I couldn’t find anything else that I really liked.
I’m sitting here now in a cloud of it and I have a big smile on my face. Smell is such an amazing memory-jogger. I remember once, several years ago, being on the escalator on the tube when the Daughter’s father suddenly came into my mind. I was somewhat taken-aback as I hadn’t thought about him for years. But then I realised that the man in front of me was wearing Paco Rabanne, which is the cologne he always wore. I put that little incident in What’s Eating Me. But I digress – so, yes, I’m sitting watching the French Open, which for once is being shown in its entirety on a channel I’ve got, smiling at happy memories of Ibiza that keep on floating into my mind. A time when I was rich, young and carefree! Lovely!
So, as you can gather from this, I’m not getting on with much writing… I’ve got two projects on the go and both are at a bit of a standstill. I’m doing the beating myself up – which is getting me nowhere – surprise! So, I have decided to produce a weekly schedule which marks out my writing time. I know that this won’t automatically help me overcome my writer’s block, but at least if I’ve got ‘Writing’ on said timetable then it will get me in front of the screen, even if one eye is on the French Open 😉 I must be honest, though, that as much as I love and adore tennis I do only really tend to watch matches when players I like are on court. Murray plays later today. I do hope he does well. Not as well as Rafa, though, who I am praying will win his 10th French Open title this year. Last week during Vagina Monologues, Anna Karen and I were trying to out-Rafa each other; both of us claimed to love him the most!
I went to a rehearsal for One Night Only again yesterday. It is so lovely to see the Daughter and her dancing-days friends putting on their teletones again and for such a worthy cause. The choreographer had to stop to change a nappy. A dancer had to learn the routine with her little boy on her hip. Yet they are all there, working hard, raising money for their childhood friend’s cancer treatment. I am SO PROUD of them all!
And something else making me smile is my cousin Brian, who is starting his own blog!! Yay! Go, Brian! I can’t wait to read it and I’ll publish the link here so that you can read it, too. Enjoy the rest of your Bank Holiday!
