Welcome to the Annotated Apollinaire

But where's the perfume?

There’s the perfume. (That is, a tiny bit of it.)

Welcome, readers of Perfumes: The A–Z Guide and anyone else who’s stumbled upon this space!

If you’re looking for perfume talk, my erstwhile co-author has returned to reviewing in a big way at his own blog.

I’ve retired from reviewing, because I’ve neglected my other interests for too long.

I can’t say yet what my main focus will be. All I can say is that I am starting with a project I’ve been working on a while: my English translations of the great French modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Lovers of literature, Paris, the early 20th Century, and footnotes, you’ll be served well. Everyone else … come back later.

What else? Well, since I linked up with Luca in 2007, along with writing all those perfume books, we’ve been wanderers. I moved from New York to London, Boston, Athens, Ulm, Athens again, and now Buckingham in the English countryside. I’ve traveled the globe, by plane, train, ferry, and automobile (and sometimes on the back of his motorcycle). I’ve improved my French, learned a smattering of Greek and German, and most recently got to reading fairly well in Italian. What we cook for dinner has become a truly eclectic event. And the terrible haircuts I’ve had in places where scissors have never touched a Chinese hair probably deserve a post all to themselves.

I want to use this space to think about all we’ve been through, what I’ve seen, heard, tasted, felt, read. I want to tell you what I know, and describe what it turns out I absolutely don’t know.

The fact is, I never felt like a perfume writer. I was a writer who wrote some things about perfume. Now it’s time to get on with everything else.

Always post a picture of a cat if poss.