Guerlain Mitsouko, vintage extrait, always and forever: I promised myself I’d grow into Mitsouko in 2009. I did. If it smells magnificent but outdated to you at first, here’s what you do. Wear it to the market. Wear it to the coffee shop for your weekly correspondence hour. Wear it on your saddest birthday ever; mix with Jim Beam. Wear it to cookouts and zombie movie night. Leave it on couches and pillows. One day you’ll pick out the jasmine and almost cry: you’ve put in the time, you’ve arrived, it’s yours. Seriously no one outside of fraghead circles wears smooth-talking peach chypres anymore, so get ready for confused phone calls from friends — “Are you at the bar? I smelled you but I can’t find you” — and hyperbole from slimz.

Tauer Lonestar Memories: Bug spray in summer, smoke & saddle in winter, thank God.

Annick Goutal Sables + Serge Lutens Gris Clair: Doesn’t maple syrup + charred lavender sound great? This layering, garçonnish but purring, is the only way I can pull off immortelle. The song you listen to right before you leave the house is “A pile ou face”. (NB: discovered today by absolute accident that J. Lo Glow + five minutes of scrubbing off same + two applications of rubbing alcohol + unscented lotion to uncrack skin + Fresh Cannabis Rose = not at all the same notes but a similar effect, sweet floral warmth and herbed dirt. A normal day.)

L’Artisan Bois Farine: Took up with this little guy in November and brought it to Florida. When applied to grief it loses its peanutbuttery insouciance, becomes all warm flour-cloud. This is how you sit correctly.

We were stopped on South Audley Street by the two gigantic elephant-sized elephants made entirely of china that filled the high window of Goodes.

‘What do you make of those?’ asked C.D., calling my attention to them.

‘Crazy,’ I replied admiringly.

‘Would you like to have them?’

‘They’re what I want most.’

C.D. considered. ‘Only one I think though, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Two’s too much.’

‘We’d like to inquire about the elephants in your window,’ C.D. told the startled sales clerk. ‘We rather fancy something for our hall. We have a very big hall and we need something to fill it. I think one of those elephants would do nicely in our front hall, wouldn’t it, my dear? Right in the centre.’

‘Not perhaps the teensiest bit off centre?’ I wondered.

‘Dear me, no. Dead centre. Yes. Instead of a fountain.’

‘Now I see. Of course, darling.’

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me