abatstone
- Feb 19, 2021
- 2 min read

Perfume Holy Grails and Gin

I saw this on Instagram today:

Blimey! Apparently there is a waiting list to get a £69 bottle! Do I wait on the shore or at Stonehenge, in a cape, for Click and Collect?

I love perfume. Always have. Ever since I was fifteen, many equinoxes ago, my best friend Laura and I would make a weekly pilgrimage to the perfume counter of ‘big girl’ department store Owen and Owen in Basingstoke town centre. ‘Impulse’ was for ‘First Years’ - we had graduated to the holy grails of perfume: Poison, Paris, Giorgio by Beverly Hills and Opium.

Our fragrance mission was daring. If we could avoid the ladies with 'Clarins' orange faces, pearls and shoulder pads we would grab the tester bottle with our nail bitten fingers and give our stonewashed denim jackets three or four big squirts. On a successful Saturday the scent would last all week. When we became truly accomplished we would spray Jazz or Korus on the opposite side and pretend that it was the scent of our much longed for boyfriends. The scent also covered the smell of B&H fags that we nicked from Laura's Dad.

This is not me. These girls are models. Images of me at this age have been burned. By me.

No one wants to see the Fort Hill 'Nutella Years'.

The heady notes of Poison still have the power to transport me back to my fumbling adolescence, Lady Di, Miami Vice, Just Seventeen, ice skating discos and blushing when asking for ‘half’ on the bus.

So back to today. What would Eau De Shed smell of??

Gin? Divorce? Universal credit? Mrs Bennet and her poor nerves?