PERFUME UPDATE

Many thanks to those of you who have voted in the poll on the right and if you haven’t voted and would like to, please do so.

James has responded with a whole post at Nourishing Obscurity and I thank him for taking the trouble to do so and for providing a man’s take on the issue.

A few years ago, back in Cardiff, I bumped into someone I’d taught twenty years previously and she told me :

“I’ve never forgotten what you said one day when one of us remarked that you wore too much perfume.”

“Oh, what was that?” I asked as I didn’t have the faintest idea what I might have said.

I did, however, recall that my perfume at that time was Charlie, one which, although it has been revamped, I feel too old to wear now. Charlie was the girl about town, who daringly strode to work in a trouser suit. Impeccably groomed, she was the sort of girl who gets her eyeliner on straight first time and you just knew she never made a mistake in her job. The perfume was meant to confirm that she was, nonetheless, entirely feminine.

"You said, ‘The day you can afford to use perfume as lavishly as me, I’ll argue with you.’ ”

I was astonished, reader, firstly that I had had such power of repartee as a young teacher and secondly that anyone should remember it. Such a remark would be deemed politically incorrect now and I’d probably be drummed out of the profession for drawing attention to pupils’ poverty or something [which had not been my intention – I was just trying to get on with my lesson!]

The girl continued, “So I decided I wanted to earn enough money to use perfume the way you did and now I do.”