CHURCHILL'S PERFUME

I don't often write about perfume (in fact I never have) but a recent introduction to a certain scent over Christmas has compelled me to today.

'Blenheim Bouquet' by Penhaligon's was a favourite of Winston Churchill's but I wasn't to know that until after I had fallen in love with this particular fragrance that, to my uneducated nose, smells how I imagine a pool of melted blue sapphires might smell if they were to even have a scent, which they don't.

Just a sniff of this stuff is enough to transport me to some fantasy lagoon where all human odour is finally defeated and the only music playing is 'O Soave Sia Il Vento', 'Un Aura Amorosa' and Aurette Amiche' from Mozart's elysian opera 'Cosi Fan Tutte' and where the wind is scented with this citrusy aroma and merely by breathing it in extends a mortal life by ten years, no, make it twenty.

The perfume was created for the 9th Duke of Marlborough who, no doubt, was the chap who introduced his own dedicated bouquet to his first cousin Winston Churchill. It's comforting to know that Churchill felt no overt jealousy to his cousin in not having such a transcendent scent of his own. If the old bulldog PM had had his own perfume designed to match his personality/sensibility I imagine it would combine the pungent aroma of Cuban cigars ('Romeo y Julieta' and 'La Aroma de Cuba'), the fresh berry flavours of Pol Roger with an earthy finish of sausages and bacon.

I should so be a perfumier now. ^^

Anyway, perhaps it's a sign of getting older but anything that re-stimulates increasingly dulled senses encourages a far heightened state of rapture than in my youth when everything smelled like Lynx Java.