Decompression notes on return

It's time to reclaim ordinary days in the spirit of Martin Parr. But let's add scent to that.

I type at 4am with jet lag, staring at the takeaway on the table on my return from New Zealand. The rain pings against London sash windows, another storm warning ahead. The takeaway on the kitchen table is playing a stand off with me. I tell it “be gone. You are not my early breakfast.”

I should maybe wait and let everything settle with the jet lag before I eat or write, but sometimes these times are the most precious. The percolating moments still rising through the spout, warm but less filtered. The jet lag moments when all the rules can be broken.

Reflecting on this trip, labyrinth became a theme. Reunions that took place after long periods came with a sense of re-entering cosy cul-de-sacs. Seeing those I have not met for years I realised I was presenting my crystallised self, ready for brief interpretation. But time dissipated all this almost immediately. The nourishment taken from those in person reunions became as priceless as the memories of the gigantic seaweeds and white froth of the ocean I revisited. I can still smell the blood of the iron sands.

The Southern skies stay with me always. They are a skeet (my made-up word, but one that fits) etched behind my eyes. The moon hangs with a different face (a rabbit), and the air doesn’t stagnate in it’s own cul-de-sacs for days like it can on the continent or amongst the urban brick of London or the endless days in Provence, but shifts constantly with the tides. It’s vibrant and dynamic like the Pacific Ocean, which I swam in every day with a different kind of gusto compared to how I enter the Mediterranean Sea.

While away I offered friends a place to stay when they come to Europe and a self-conscious image flashed in my mind about the difference my life presents to the more modern clean and minimal aesthetic of the Antipodes.

Fragrance, books and objects seem to sit on every shelf in my France home. I return with a suitcase of formulas and compounds, blocks of New Zealand beeswax and shea butter and macerated oils. It was a replacement for the duty free booty that was twinkling at me from the shelves and which I ignored like I will ignore that begging takeaway.

I have returned wanting to catalogue and organise everything. The DeuxPies apothecary vision, botanicals, healing, fragrance, is wonderfully complex but I recognise we need to present it with more order … but this all takes so much time. And this messy phase is important as that’s where the development comes from. There is a mammoth task ahead that my tired jet lag brain cannot fathom that is being fitted around full time work. It’s like a long burn hobby. It’s my replacement for chores of running family life but still easily and welcomingly interrupted by them. I am not going to hurry but let it all settle.

Walking through the terminal I obsessively circled back twice to Christine Nagel’s Eau de Basilic Pourpre for Hermes and I will do again on the next travel leg to France. It struck a chord. Perhaps the purple basil was reminding me of future summer holidays at home in France with my own family, the family I have created here.

Eau de Basilic Pourpre, Hermes

I understood why a love of fragrance is so etched in my sister and I when our 82 y.o. mother told us of her observation while sitting in the botanical rose gardens. She had gone there with my father and they had tucked their nose into every single rose breed. They then sat down on a bench to watch passers by and observed that no one else smelt a rose but were only taking photos of them. Are we about to lose our olfactory memories next along with our ordinary days?

I read Martin Parr’s has died on my return.

His Ordinary Days campaign for Yves St Laurent I loved this year. I am sure he took this on as a quiet cultural indicator of how even ordinary days are being stolen from us. It’s hard to look that expensive as they do in YSL’s campaign and Parr’s work was always a bit of a mirror held up to the everyday, unflinchingly honest. In that campaign he showed how the chasm had become so wide it had merged.

The irony of “Ordinary Days” for YSL, a luxury house turning to the master of the ordinary, is the sort of cultural twist I am fascinated by. And now, with Parr’s death, it almost feels like an era of unvarnished British observation has closed. And as the curtain sadly closes on the Parr era of observation, I am left with the unsettling and oddly beautiful realisation that in this fast paced world the ordinary has never been so extraordinary.

I am going to do my best to reclaim and protect ordinary days. Life does not have to be perfect.

Post script notes:

1. I invite you to check out this labyrinth project by my post humanist cousin Joanna Pascoe. This is a picture of her latest one today. She was the one who reminded me that life is like a labyrinth, not a time line.

Jo Pascoe building the Labyrinth. Photos courtesy of Joanna Pascoe.

“In this journey through the labyrinth we get to meet the Minotaur, who is us” says Joanna.

2. On the plane journey home I read ‘The Mirror Book’ by Charlotte Grimshaw, thanks to a friend lend, in one read. A thread in it is the theme of nature which is stitched into every New Zealand childhood and how generational gaps evolve. If you are from New Zealand I very much recommend it. If you are not then I also recommend The Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet, which it reminded me of too.