On a very hot evening in Athens some weeks ago, I met Tudor Ristea, creative director of Ataraxia perfumes. His Deity was a finalist in the Art and Olfaction Awards, and he asked me whether I wanted to smell it. I did, and disliked it not because of anything specific to the composition, but because it’s a honey perfume and I hate the genre. He seemed completely unfazed by my snap judgment, and asked whether I wanted instead to smell a perfume he hated, his Spinal Fluid. He explained that he had tried to do a perfume that was entirely wrong, and succeeded.

In my opinion, artists are allowed to do ugly things once in a while just to clear the pipes. Too much hankering after beauty frays one’s nerves. A relative of mine (family legend) apparently visited a perfume firm in Grasse and at the end of the tour asked for “un peu de merde, s’il vous plaît.” I remember thirty years ago Issey Miyake did a brown duffle coat whose texture was uncannily like a cow’s rear end caked in dung. Liberty bought a couple of dozen in all sizes, could not sell them at the outrageous asking price and eventually reduced them to practically nothing. Weeks later they were still on offer, now down to the cost of two coffees. Still no one would have them. I assume this did Miyake a power of good.

Spinal Fluid packs a huge slug of indole. Indole, typically described as “fecal, floral in dilution” in learned texts, is actually neither. It smells more like rotten teeth at all concentrations, and a touch of rotten teeth happens to make a floral smell more interesting. The other main note in Spinal Fluid’s composition is a blast of heating oil. When we lived in Athens in a big drafty house, I always enjoyed the times when the delivery truck rolled out a pipe from the street and poured a cubic meter of the fragrant stuff into the basement tank. Heating oil may not have the escapist connotations of jet fuel, but it is still a friendly dragon’s breath.

I doubt very much there will ever be a more outrageously Goth fragrance. Tudor Ristea seemed surprised when I told him I really liked Spinal Fluid. I, in turn, was surprised when Tania too declared it good. You have been warned.

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Fifty years ago I first heard of Lazar Berman, an extraordinary Russian pianist who had been confined to the Soviet Union and prevented from doing international concert tours. Aficionados knew about him from his Melodiya recordings alone. Berman had perfected a unique combination of massive strength and crisp delicacy that was perfect for Late Romantic pieces. Like all People’s Artists of the Russian Federation, he earned his living by touring the USSR and giving concerts in dozens of small venues. In 1975 he was finally allowed to travel to the US and became an overnight worldwide sensation.

Someone told me that he had recorded the Scriabin concerto (one of my favorites) and I looked for that record everywhere. I walked into my go-to record store and said to the vastly knowledgeable guy behind the counter “I am looking for Lazar Berman’s recording of the Scriabin F# minor concerto.” His reply was “Aren’t we all?” and he added, with a speech defect that gave extra spin to his words “If you’re looking for wubbish like Bawenboim, we’ve got bloody miles of it.”

Yesterday I remembered this and asked the Web whether the recording had been released. I had been misinformed. There was no such recording in 1975, but there was an unreleased recording from 1992 on YouTube. I finally heard it. It is the absolute best recording of the piece. It felt as if my original informant, the record shop guy and I had willed this thing into existence. Circle closed.

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I’ve just been through a very exciting few days. A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by OpenAI who had read a previous post of mine and asked whether I’d be interested in joining a group of academics and scientists who are trying to figure out what LLMs can do for them. I said yes, and by way of a very generous reward, was comped a six-month subscription to their most powerful model. My contact urged me to use an app called Codex, about which I knew nothing, and report back. Codex is a bit different from the usual chat because it can work on files in your computer, edit, compare and save. Until recently I had not much use for it.

Then I found out my next task was to write a huge European Research Council grant in a new scheme called ERC Plus, an explicitly blue-skies research program. Such things only come along rarely, and I’ve been lucky in the past with them, so I decided to apply. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with scientific grant applications, the way it works in practice is you need to produce a sheaf of documents (41 for the ERC) detailing every aspect of the grant from top-level, i.e why what you plan to do is interesting, to such things as depreciation schedules over the duration of the grant. Large universities have entire departments dedicated to getting this right. The maddening peculiarity of this is that your grant can be killed by criticism aimed at it on any level from grand plan to small detail. Gone are the days of Carothers’s—he discovered Nylon®—job description:”To pursue such things as may be of interest.”

I have two months to write it, and a savvy colleague two weeks ago opined that I was unlikely to make the deadline. I was curious to see what AI would do for me. I uploaded old and new publications and various drafts of papers, applications and experimental data. I then asked Codex “is there any way that Codex can help me organise these documents and works schedule for a pending grant application?” What happened next was a white-knuckle ride lasting two sixteen-hour days. What Codex did was go to the ERC website, identify the 41 documents needed, their detailed requirements, their specific formatting. It then built a replica of the website on my machine. It worked out all the dependencies of one document on another (you can’t work out depreciation intil you know what you’re buying) and drew up a list of things to do. Then it created a tracker spredsheet to keep track of progress.

What AI has done is rub our noses into the fact that, conservatively, 80% of what we do is boring and has been done before. The worst tasks are those where the remaining 20%, the interesting, novel stuff is chopped so fine and mixed so well with the tedium that you have to eat them both or none. Codex breezes through the small stuff and lets you worry about the big issues. It also deals with intermediate obstacles put up by the system to make you want to give up and cry: things like Work Packages, another word for subtasks borrowed from the world of engineering and awkwardly applied to science. If you’re building an airplane, a logical sequence is required. If you’re hunting the unicorn less so. There is also the dreaded Risk Mitigation part, where you have to explain plans B-K at every point. On those bits I used AI to see what the best task split was and what alternatives it suggests, and picked among different versions.

The back-and forth generated at lightning speed a hundred or so pages of dialogue ranging form the minute “fix the spelling of aluminum” to the grand “check project description for logic and fluency.” I estimate conservatively that Codex did the work of at least two full-time assistants, except much faster and without ever sleeping. At MIT I might have found them in the Research Office if I took a number and got in line. With Codex they were fetching the ball and coming back for more in seconds. At one point I was naughty and pitted Claude against GPT for comments. When you use the top level models they become seriously smart and persnickety. Feeding comments from one to the other was amusing: they remained polite “those are very good comments” and tore into each other until the versions converged. Finally I had to say to GPT “you’re overthinking this” and to my relief it agreed.

On one thing AI failed miserably. The ERC requires a ≈1-page Vision Statement explaining why your project needs to be funded by this scheme rather than an ordinary grant, and why you are the right person to make it happen. I had not been asked such a thing before and had no drafts. I knew AI couldn’t write it, but just for fun I let both LLMs have a go, and it was pathetic babble. Why? Because at this point LLMs know little about me, and do not know in which perspective I hold things in my mind, what is bigger and what is larger, what comes first and what can wait. The AI vision thing was a raving laundry list of disparate things. I’m glad LLMs don’t know about this Substack, or they might have tried to connect perfume writing to Drosophila behavior.

The heady feeling of revenge against bureaucratic gatekeeping felt like an irresistible surge through enemy lines. In my report to OpenAI I described the effect as being like a headlong cavalry charge. Now I must calm down and read the whole thing again.

Few manufactured objects in Europe bear the stamp Made in Belgium, but the country made an outsize export contribution to European culture: comics (BD, bande dessinée pronounced bédé) such as Tintin, the Smurfs and many others like the immortal Gaston Lagaffe. Because they are in French (native language to half of Belgium), they are often assumed to be French. Until high school, most of what I knew about the world came from Tintin. One of my favorite comics used to be Michel Vaillant. Its author Jean Graton could not draw a likeness to save his life, and everyone in Vaillant stories has the same chiseled jaw, tiny nose, and face built on a grid plan. Graton clearly had some form of prosopagnosia. Human faces eluded him and the entire cast of MV looked like a 1950’s hairdresser model, but the faces of the cars (cars had faces until very recently) were lovingly drawn with perfect accuracy. The cover of the very first MV book, Le Grand Défi (the great challenge) introduces Michel Vaillant and his nemesis, Texas-born Steve Warson. Warson and Vaillant in the foreground are rather wooden, but the Ferrari, Maserati and Porsche contenders in the background are faultless.

Jean Graton’s greatest contribution to the art of the comic is his depiction of sound as text. Huge letters floating around the cars supply the soundtrack in French onomatopoea. Engines go wrooaw, brakes squeal iiiiiii. This is the painterly version of noises made by a child when pushing Dinky Toy models of cars around on the living room carpet.

When I was a kid, cars were an object of passion. I will never forget the first time I saw my first Citroën DS, Lamborghini Miura, or Bizzarrini GT. I was seized with emotion every time I saw a 1961 Valiant (actually a Plymouth), thinking it was a real live Vaillante. Sixteen Vaillante sports cars were actually built for the 40th anniversary of the comic strip, and every one was instantly sold to fanatics. One day people will find it hard to picture the intensity of the love affair between humans and machines. In fact, that day is now: my grown children care little about cars and look at me askance when I comment on some sublime sports car in local traffic (I live close to Silverstone race track and petrolheads abound). Electric cars have no mouth, smaller eyes and are mute. Ferrari’s beautiful Jony Ive-designed Luce has loudspeakers to make engine noise. It’s all over. Maybe the petrol car will survive as a luxury product like mechanical watches, a “dress car”, or maybe it will simply turn to rust.

Rubini is nominally a pharmacy in a beautiful arcaded street in Mantova, but they clearly did not heed the memo that says “just sell Roger & Gallet and keep your head down.” They have produced five perfumes since 2015, spaced at three year intervals, which suggests thought and deliberation. All of them are art-directed by Andrea Bissoli Rubini and composed by Cristiano Canali. Canali himself started out as a pharmacy school graduate, and now works at Mane, a venerable Grasse firm with a terrific range of naturals. The Rubini pharmacy has for generations been selling perfume. Shades of Habanita, allegedly composed by an unnamed Grasse perfumer in the days where the two trades were adjacent.

Canali seems incapable of composing a boring perfume, and all his creations merge opposites: they smell reassuringly good while being strange and puzzling. L’Eau Très Mer1 starts out with a terrific (and novel) salty accord made of a camphor material, possibly some sort of celery, and a marine note. Behind it is an unusual take on vetiver. Vetiver has many facets, the two most prominent being anisic-liquorice and rooty-earthy. L’Eau Très Mer’s vetiver never settles for one or the other. A powerful but stealthy sandalwood note steadies the entire thing by filling in all the gaps. If I had to triangulate it from past experience, L’Eau Très Mer would lie midway between the archetypal “salty” fragrance Virgilio (Diptyque, 1990) and Jean-Michel Duriez’s suave liquorice Yohji Homme (1999). True to Canali’s aesthetic, L’Eau Très Mer is neither plush nor sharp, and flickers between the two at every sniff even in the drydown. A total charmer, all the more fetching for being so elusive.

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The best thing that happened at Esxence was an opportunity for a longer conversation with Patricia de Nicolaï. I went to her stand, which was manned by her son and daughter and found her sitting there, letting the next generation take care of things. I have been a devoted fan of her work since New York came out 1989. I have seen the house mature (in presentation only, the fragrances were top flight from the start) and become solidly luxurious, with a consistent look and high quality packaging, good enough to signal taste and expense but not so fancy as to suggest you're mainly playing for the bottle cap. This time at Exsence there was a definite feeling of the changing of the guard. The kids treated me with the wary politeness one reserves towards potentially tedious old farts liable to start telling war stories.

Patricia was very welcoming. She is the triple-distilled incarnation of French grande dame, not detectably snob, just immensely proper and upright. I think she likes me partly because I gush about her work and she knows this is not due to giddy influencer enthusiasm. I explained to her that her New York Intense had recently been put to work in my household. The last few months have on occasion been a little trying, and I have found the sovereign remedy: spray NYI on any fabric in the bedroom and succour will come. I believe at various times in my life New York has been like a friend providing support and reassurance. I said this to her and she told me about a fragrance I had not been aware of, a Harrods exclusive.

Patricia explained that Patchouli Spirit, as the fragrance is called, was the result of a clamor from the afición for more patchouli, and that she had dosed it to the limit of what she considered reasonable. I must here confess that I have a weird thing with patchouli. When pure I can smell it in traces, but whenever it is put in a formula it essentially disappears to my nose. Sure enough, PI does not smell like pachouli to me. I think of patchouli as being made of three parts: camphoraceous, geosmin-like earthy and a warm, almost chocolate dusty-brown cloud that alone does the work when in composition.

Patchouli Spirit is arguably the only fragrance other than New York in her lineup that has that spirit of penumbral peace I love. In composition it sits somewhere between Guelain’s Derby and New York itself, but lighter, more transparent than either. It has a lavender-tea aspect which the other two don’t, and is less oakmossy than either. In the last few years I had felt that de Nicolai fragrances had become more stark, louder and perhaps too vivid to my taste. Patchouli Spirit is in the first De Nicolaï manner, superbly comfortable and warm. In these loud times, a quiet masterpiece is exactly what the doctor ordered.

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Esxence has spawned a number of related exibits, some really nice, much more relaxing and, I imagine, cheaper than the big one. This one at 10 Corso Como was airy, quiet and beautiful. Frassaï was exhibiting there and I smelled some great stuff, about which more soon.

One of eight such aisles at Esxence, plus large stands at the end. Exhausting and overwhelming to the nose. Today was relatively quiet. My general impression was that Italian brands are on the rise (dozens of (something) Milano outfits). Also vast and beautifully appointed exhibits from the Gulf. Huge churn; I have no numbers, but I’d say easily half of last year’s firms did not turn up. Also fickle: stands which were mobbed last year, deserted this time round. The highlight for me: I smelled reconstructed ancient Egyptian Kyphi at the Osmothèque, and can reveal that Jacques Guerlain was in fact reincarnated from 2000 BC. I will report on some specific finds.

A couple of weeks ago I received a package from Frassaï with a message from owner and art director Natalia Outeda telling me to keep these under wraps until their release, which was yesterday. I like Frassaï fragrances a lot, limited or not. Outeda is a former evaluator at Givaudan and clearly has a rare skill in picking perfumers and pushing them to do their best. Frassaï fragrances are always more complex and detailed than their initial shape would suggest. They do not go for arresting top accords, one-liner ideas or huge power. In that sense they are classical, more like a well-constructed piece of chamber music than a hit earworm. They reward study, which is now unusual. These are limited editions of 350 bottles each. I am in principle against limited editions, which I associate with go-faster stripes added to small cars just before a complete model change. Artificial scarcity is not my thing, moissanite is plentiful and as good as diamond, and Coty was right: if the stuff is good, make enough of it for the entire world to experience it.

A notable technical aspect of these two fragrances is that they list upcycled rice vanilla as a material. I had to look this up, and it turns out to be a biotechnology process to turn the ferulic acid in rice into vanillin, motivated by the fact that vanilla has become ridiculously expensive. I assume what makes it worth it over pure synthetic vanillin are the impurities.

For paid subscribers: reviews of A Sigh of Dawn and Fraise de Nuit

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Finally, at Luton airport on my way to Milan and Esxence, I get to smell Christine Nagel’s latest, much praised by perfumers and, it seems, widely panned otherwise. Hermès logistics in the UK is unconscionably bad, none of the retail outfits that stock Hermès seemed to have it, and at the airport they did not have a tester.

What is it like? Puzzling. First impression on spraying it is “where is it?” As a perfumer friend used to say, “on le cherche sur la touche.”1 But it’s there all right, rather pale and evanescent. I have mixed feelings about the intensity. On the one hand, many of the current masculines —I am assuming this is unisex and will also be worn by men—are so appallingly loud that a perfume that speaks in a quiet voice is an unquestioned blessing. On the other hand: speak up, man.

Ok but what does it smell like? Very novel, actually, and I really understand why perfumers, those galley-ship rowers for corporate satraps, consider UJSLM to be a beau geste, a reckless dash for freedom. It reminds me in color of some of those jelly Haribos that are blue at one end and orange at the other. It is translucent, definitely salty at one end and fruity at the other. The thing that makes it interesting is the opaline character of both notes. The salty bit definitely smells like proper ambergris at times, a bracing deserted-beach algal smell. The fruit, imaginatively described on the Hermès website as a lush tiaré note, actually smells like a cross between mandarin and persimmon, i.e. plangent.

Owing to some incomprehensible masking effect which may or may not be deliberate, it gets stronger on the strip as it dries down, and the accord is very stable. I have many times said that a masculine should if possible be melancholy. UJSLM definitely does that well. I need to live with it for a few weeks to see whether my hand will want to reach for that feeling in the morning. In the meantime I’m afraid it it likely destined for commercial failure, like all attempts at interesting unisex florals (e.g Givenchy’s Insensé).

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Horowitz and Hill’s “The Art of Electronics” is arguably the best technical book ever written. Its devotees should perhaps invent a secret handshake to signal their faith to each other and save time in conversation. Entire chapters read like a novel for nerds. I have read it from one end to the other several times, though I confess I find the chapters on digital electronics less passionate than those on analog devices. There is very little physics in digital, it’s all a bit disembodied. The authors’ wisdom, vivid prose and sense of fun leaves no topic untouched. Except, that is, for one glaring omission: the shadowy, scandalous, unmentionable memristor.

I owe the reader some explanation. The three standard circuit elements, resistor, inductor and capacitor do very different things when connected to a battery. Connect the battery to a resistor R, and it will restrict the flow of current. R is friction, and is represented by its mechanical analog, the dashpot. Put an inductor (a coil of wire) L in and the current will start reluctantly and build up, storing energy in the magnetic field. Disconnect it, and the energy in the magnetic field will be handed back. L is a flywheel. Put a capacitor C in the wire instead, and the current will flow and charge the capacitor until the voltage across its terminals equals battery voltage, at which point the current stops. C is a spring. These are as three of the four classical human temperaments: phlegmatic, steady, proportionate opposition; choleric, reluctance followed by momentum when roused; melancholy, passive compliance followed by sullen pushback.

For those not familiar with circuitry, let me state outright that few dinner parties end up in heated arguments about R, L and C. Mention the memristor in polite company, however, and tempers can flare. It was invented, or to be more exact postulated in 1971 by Leo Ong Chua, a Philippines-born US scientist. Chua noticed a broken symmetry in the circuit elements. They embody relations between four quantities: voltage, current, charge and magnetic flux. These quantities can be arranged in a square and linked to one another by R, L and C. Chua noticed there was a missing link, that connecting flux to charge, and postulated the existence of a missing circuit element with mysterious properties: like a resistor, it opposes the flow of current but its opposition is variable and depends on past history. How? Unspecified, but there must be a dependence, the memristor must remember how much current has flowed through it and adjust accordingly. If this sounds vague, it is. The memristor differs in kind from the other circuit elements. R, L and C are predictable. Pick one from a drawer, read the value in ohms, henrys or farads and you will know exactly how they will behave when connected. The memristor is different. It remembers. When put in a circuit, it will act according to its—unknown—back story.

Where can you buy a memristor? Nowhere. Many things have been claimed to be memristors, and indeed many of the early electrical experiments by early 19-century luminaries like Faraday used components that were impure, so to speak, and whose behavior depended on what maltreatment they had received in previous experiments. Chua has argued that these were memristors, and dubbed it the oldest circuit element. To this day, however, nobody can claim to have made a thing with two wires sticking out of it that is incontrovertibly a memristor. After much early enthusiasm, the general feeling now seems to be one of polite dismissal. The symmetry noticed by Chua is not a fundamental symmetry of physics and has been described disparagingly as a “circuit theory accounting trick.” There is something contrived and needlessly complex about the memristor’s imagined behavior, and it does not amount to a proper device you can hold in your hand and buy in packs of 10 with a 1% tolerance on values.

I always had a hard time getting a seat-of-the pants feeling about the elusive habits of the memristor, and wanted a mechanical analogue to the dashpot, spring and flywheel, but could not find one anywhere, Recently I asked AI specifically to find me a mechanical device exhibiting memristor behavior and it went away for an age (2 minutes 33 seconds) before coming back with a surprising answer:

The hydraulic door closer! I always thought there was something weirdly alive about door closers. They move swiftly through most of their arc then suddenly go all careful in the last bit to latch the door without slamming it. Hydraulic door closers are smart things that exhibit graceful behavior. Door closers have manners. If a hydraulic door closer is an approximation to a memristor, could it be that the memristor is the fourth temperament, the sanguine? Look at the guy at bottom left of Lavater’s diagram. Unlike the others, he is not visibly burdened by excess of one humor. He is just a handsome dude with vivid eyes, an elegant hairdo and a handsome profile. You imagine him tall and well dressed. And he should be: Lavater’s sanguine is in fact clearly a portrait of Giacomo Casanova, the genius diarist, voluptuary and spy. Sanguine, in Lavater’s mind, just means brilliant, sociable, versatile. Sanguine shines in company, and outsmarts its companions. So there we have it: I would argue that the memristor is the fourth temperament of electrical components. The ideal memristor, when first connected, would likely recount its escape from the Piombi prison in Venice before starting a ménage à quatre with companions discreetly referred to as R., L. and C.

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I’m setting up my new lab from an empty space, a real joy, and trying to avoid everything I have found depressing in almost all the labs I worked in. I will post a video when all is done. In the meantime I was unpacking tools and found these two spanners. The one on the left comes from the local flea market, cost me £5 and is none other than a famous King Dick spanner from the Abingdon Tools Company. They also made motorcycle engines until 1933. I love the battered metal, the punched-in marks, the stout proportions. I wish I could reconstruct what caused each little dent. It still works, though there is some play. On the right, a Facom adjustable spanner. Facom stands for Franco-Américaine Construction Outillage Mécanique (b. 1918) , and is a legend in France for the quality (and cost) of its tools. I bought a full toolkit when I last had a large grant, and fulfilled an old dream. It feels almost liquid in the hand, and the mechanism has a very tight tolerance. Facom also makes two things I sadly have no need for: the amazing “Swedish” self-tightening pipe wrench that brightens plumber’s lives all over Europe; and a beautiful beryllium-copper non-sparking hammer. Beryllium, by itself a mysteriously toxic metal, makes a harmless hard alloy with ductile copper that retains the heat conductivity for which copper is famous. What this does is conduct heat away from any impact of the tool so that no sparks fly. If you should need to hammer picture nails into the wall in a room filled with an explosive gas mixture, it’s your friend.

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Like most people who live outside London, I find taking the Underground an exciting experience. There is so much to enjoy: the criss-cross tunnels (how did they design all that before 3D models?); the unfamiliar words (northbound); the felicitous match between line color and name (Northern black, Central red, Circle yellow); the excitement of being caught in a crowd hastening towards an escalator as if something amazing awaited at the bottom; the weird dirty cleanness of everything, grimy but smelling of disinfectant; the ghostly voice (mind….the gap); the prim voice (this is the Picadilly Line to…Cockfosters); the announcements to the effect that trains are running late, an absurdity when there’s one every two minutes and you don’t care which one you take; the disconnection between where you enter and where you exit, places that could be on different planets until one day you take a bus and confirm they are joined up.

But for someone like me who typically looks down when walking and climbing stairs, the Underground is also home to an artefact both humble and mysteriously grand: the nosing. Many if not most stairs have one, a metal strip on the front edge intended to provide grip as you step up or down. In places with moderate traffic like offices this would be rubber. In the Underground, rubber would be reduced to dust in a few weeks, and something more eternal is needed. The metal strips are a small inlay of pure luxury in the otherwise drab stairway. The metal itself is the color of rose gold. Rose gold is a recent addition to the range of metallic colors. It is the Gianduja of metallics, beguiling in small doses and pretty filling soon after. No one admits to loving it, though I once bought a laptop in that shade and am only slightly ashamed. The rose gold in the underground steps is resplendent, but mysteriously dotted with black grains like broken nuts in chocolate. In the middle of the nosing, a baffling inscription: AATI, followed by a phone number, like a graffiti on a toilet wall.

AATI, on further enquiry, turns out to be the acronym of Antislip Antiwear Treads International, a company that has a virtual monopoly in stair jewelry. I was wondering what the beautiful metal was, and it turns out to be Nickel Bronze. The black grains are Silicon Carbide. The idea is that the hard carbide beads embedded in the metal will wear down very slowly, and that the strip will only need to be replaced after decades. I was so taken by the look of it that I wondered whether one could use it to make rings and bracelets, merch for Underground aficionados. The answer is no: nickel bronze is a powerful sensitizer and will cause dermatitis on contact with skin. Silicon carbide is a defective crystal, the cheap black version of beautiful Moissanite. So the nosings are in essence humble costume jewelry, and we tread on it to make sure it knows its place. As I trudge up the stairs, I wonder whether one day there will be a revolt of the downtrodden, and AATI parures will be in the window at Aspreys.

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Yesterday a minor miracle happened. I took my second daily dose of 15 mg prednisolone (cost: ≈ $1) and, within hours, got my life back. Prednisolone is a steroid used against inflammation. 15 mg is a smallish dose, and my problem was smallish but still big enough to made me miserable. Like most males my age, I had been prescribed statins to lower cholesterol. The cardiologist who prescribed them was of the opinion that the side effects reported by a good fraction of patients were all in the mind. He was comforted in this belief by a recent study. The problem with that study was that it was wrong about me. When I took the stuff I developed pain and stiffness in my legs and hips which gradually got worse over a period of weeks. Two months ago I decided to ignore doctor’s advice (“the side effects will fade with time”) and just stopped the stuff. Unfortunately the discomfort did not go away and in fact got worse.

This is where Claude AI came in. In case you haven’t used it, let me do the introductions. As a physicist colleague of mine explained to me, Claude is the most civilised of the AIs, does not sound like a business consultant, does not overuse bullet points, outputs elegant English and is full of solicitous advice. When asked for a plan B to statins, it recommended Inclisiran, an insanely clever RNA drug that travels in your blood, gets off at the liver, enters liver cells and instructs them to make a protein that lowers your cholesterol better than any statin. Inclisiran costs $2000 a shot, but apparently Novartis who makes it supplies the UK National Health with it at a deep discount. I got the shot for free, another one coming in six months.

That took care of the dreaded cholesterol, a topic almost as contentious as Middle Eastern politics. The rage on the internet about whether or not cholesterol is the main culprit in heart disease is remarkable. Cholesterol is the Affaire Dreyfus of medicine, with believers and unbelievers at each other’s throat over Thanksgiving dinners for the last 3 decades. I don’t think it will be figured out in my lifetime, but one thing is clear: whether or not you take statins, they are not a cure. You’re still going to live and die with heart disease. Inclisiran is a different beast: it vastly lowers cholesterol, but it’s too soon to tell whether it improves what are politely called outcomes.

Having taken care of the long term, I was still stuck with my pain problem. While not acute, it was like a permanent overcast sky. Having difficulty walking, getting out of cars or out of bed was a constant reminder of the outcomes. I felt I had aged ten years in a few weeks, could see myself walking like an old person, and was in a permanent state of gloom. The French believe in a thing called the Méthode Coué, according to which if you keep smiling your depression will lift. Conversely, walking in small steps while bent over and wincing will wipe all smiles off your face.

This thing almost stopped me from writing about perfume. Perfume, even when cheap, is a luxury in the sense that life does not depend on it. Writing about it is also a luxury, and pain removes all luxury from life. Second, far from eliciting empathy for others, pain makes you selfish and angry. It makes you focus only on yourself, and your desire to get better blinds you to all else. Tania urged me to go see a doctor, but I stuck to my usual tactic of waiting until I really understood what was wrong. It takes one a surprisingly long time to fully understand the habits, shape and extent of a new ailment, especially if it varies from day to day. Eventually, it became clear that things were getting worse, but by that time I could describe it exactly.

Claude released a new model of their AI, I paid the full amount and asked what my symptoms meant. Answer #1 was:

Polymyalgia rheumatica — classic in the 70+ bracket, presents as proximal stiffness (hips, thighs, shoulders), worst in the morning, often >30–60 min to loosen up. ESR/CRP usually elevated. Also associated with statin usage.

I had done some preparatory bloods while in Greece (cheap and fast), and CRP was indeed high. All the other possibilities seemed remote. But the best bit was this: Claude explained that 15 mg prednisolone essentially cures the condition within 48 hours, sometimes faster. The downside is you have to take the stuff for a year while tapering the dose gradually. My GP prescribed the stuff. “Take it for five days. If the condition stops, stop the pills. If it comes back, go back on for a year.” Deal.

It worked. Last night I realised that everything felt different. The pain was gone. I felt taller, the air I was breathing was fresh as spring water, and as I fell asleep I felt a younger me move back into my soul. I was thinking of all the centuries past when no steroids existed. No doubt in many parts of the world the situation still hasn’t changed. Countries that spend $5 per year on each citizen’s health care are unlikely to prescribe something that costs that much per week. And steroids, unlike many other drugs, have no plant equivalent. The Nobel for their discovery was given in 1950.

The fact that they are cheap is largely due to one amazing man, Russell Marker. Steroids are difficult to synthesize from smaller molecules. It’s much easier to start from a naturally occurring steroid and trim it to size, then add decorations like -OH groups, etc. Marker discovered that Mexican wild yams contained a lot of the right steroids. The chemistry company he was working for was uninterested, so he dropped everything, moved to Mexico and founded Syntex, the outfit that ended up making most contraceptives in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He was cheated out of all the profits, started a new life as a silver jewelry dealer and was only recognised by his peers very late in life, and of course posthumously. To him I owe my current happiness.

Update: stopped last Sunday, by Tue it was back, by Fri I could hardly walk. Experiment successful. Back on the stuff for the full treatment.

Because I’m fond of both Maksim Bortnikov’s compositions and Rajesh Balkrishnan’s art direction, when I heard they were sending me their new collaboration from Thailand, I could hardly wait to smell it. I fretted while the parcel sat ten days at Heathrow Customs. Yeti eventually arrived thickly wrapped in Border Force crime-scene tape. Strangely, the level in the bottle looked unchanged. Those customs guys don’t know what’s good for them.

Rajesh Balkrishnan had sent me an ingredients list. It includes different kinds of pepper berries and elemi, a peppery resin, up top; oakmoss and fir in the middle; and oud at the bottom. I could see how those would get on with each other and thought I could smell Yeti in my mind’s nose. For once I got it right.

The style is perfect for me. I’ve always loved smells that suggest both the edible and the mineral, such as the buckwheat pancakes they serve in Brittany, which I consider the Middle Ages in edible form. Many fragrances in recent years have played on this idea, using the earthy aspect of ambrox and the sugary glow of maltol. To my mind the stone food idea first entered perfumery with Feu d’Issey (Miyake, 1998), in which the accord between milky sulfurol and dry ambrox add up to a weird, bready, hot rock. Yeti belongs to this family, but its first impression is a novel accord I can only describe as citrus-barnyard. Thirty minutes later, everything coalesces into a single, smooth surface, all of a piece, without a single chink into which you could push the pointy end of a blade to split it.

Tania, as ever, got there faster than I did. She opined that it felt like an attempt to re-create a synthetic effect using natural materials. Spot on. Yeti is to the recent ambrox-maltol trend as Gerhard Richter’s paintings of B&W snapshots are to their models: larger, stranger, and if anything more deliberately austere. Maksim’s Bestia Sacra, after an intense animalic opening, settled into a clean, quiet fresh space. Yeti lands on a warmer though still horsey note. Tania thought it was so monochrome as to be practically a vibe rather than a fragrance. In the current landscape of loud masculines, striking poses like guards on parade, Yeti comes across as the exemplar of a restrained genre of perfumery at once archaic and sci-fi. If Maksim delivered to Arrakis, the good guys in Dune would wear it.

Been a bit quiet recently because of a perfect storm of work issues (moving my lab) and health issues (nothing serious).

Not much energy to write a post but still glad to answer questions, in fact it would make my day.

So go ahead as usual in comments, closing time Monday 20 5PM GMT!

The prohibition of alcohol in the Quran1 caused most of perfumery south and east of Beirut to rely on other solvents, mostly sandalwood oil. This has a blessedly wonderful smell of its own, which acts as a musical drone in the fragrances known as attars and gives the entire genre a sweet, powdery, sour-milky cast. Most sandalwood came from India, but over time, demand spread worldwide, till it began to run out in the 1990s due to over-harvesting. Prices went up, quality went down.

Attars switched to khus (vetiver oil) or paraffin oil as their solvent. However, without sandalwood, Western perfumery was deprived of a material that had long served as the resolution chord in drydowns. At that point, oud entered their palette, answering a desire for smells dirtier than civet and musk. This coincided with a huge expansion in the Gulf market for Western perfumes. Oud was then and still is the perfect hook to get customers who are used to Arab perfumes to try French. I am on record as wondering why Gulf buyers would choose crappy synthetic oud made in Germany over local stuff, cheaper and better. I now see the reason.

Western perfumery is diachronic. It happens in time through a succession of reveals, as light molecules of high volatility cede center stage to increasingly heavier ones. Like the classical concerto, it has evolved into a three-movement structure, except that the allegro is up front and the largo comes last. Each additional carbon in a compound adds roughly a factor of two to its duration as a material, so a perfume that starts with 10-carbon citrus and ends with 18-carbon musk naturally bestrides a ≈256-fold time range. In contrast, partly because perfumes using sandalwood oil as a solvent tend naturally to contain materials of heavier molecular weight, which all evaporate slowly together, attar perfumery tends to the static. What the crowds in Dubai malls were clamoring for was a diachronic perfume built from familiar materials.

The first person to articulate this idea properly is Rajesh Balkrishnan, and his artistic program is gathering momentum. Imagine French perfumery played with a completely different set of instruments, not just a token oud, cypriol or geosmin thrown in like a theremin in a standard orchestra. We have no idea what that would be like. Or to be exact, we do now, because that is precisely what Byermia is doing.

Let me interject here some praise for a neglected component of the artistic world: nerds. Rajesh Balkrishnan is a Professor of Pharmacy in Virginia, and Byermia’s founder and perfumer, Ashek Zubayer, is a Sydney-based data analyst. I am not privy to their thought processes, but I detect a wonky, systematizing hand in what is happening. Modal harmonic theory gave us both Debussy and Kind of Blue, and something analogous is happening in perfumery. I suspected a connection between these two thinkers and had an aha! moment when I found they were of course collaborating.

The recent evolution of Eastern fragrance has gone in several stages, from the pillowy muddle of Areej le Doré to the clear structures of Maksim Perfumes using essentially the same materials. Simultaneously Western perfumery went the other way and experimented with huge choral fragrances (Mallo) and vast Brucknerian color-block structures (Teone Reinthal). When I smelled Byermia fragrances I realized that the Eastern end of the process is close to completion. The range properly inaugurates a new style that I predict will change the world. Zubayer and Balkrishnan have only been at it for a few years. Who knows what they will come up with? Another reason to live long and prosper.

Samples from Bloom Perfumery

For paid subscribers, reviews of Divine Lotus, Ankura, Pushpak, Udbaha, Tiger Rouge, Ambrosia, Agrani, and Ember Shaan.

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It is currently held as self-evident that a niche brand needs a “story” to succeed, that making great perfumes does not suffice. Indeed, often the story seems to release the brand from the obligation of making even decent perfumes. Perfumery may operate under the lump of labor fallacy, the idea that if you put more effort in one area, others must suffer. The brands with the most elaborate stories and fanciest websites often produce the worst stuff. They are purifying and bottling an idea that has tainted perfumery for a long time: that customers are moronic, amnesiac and anosmic, so you can sell them anything once and they won’t know the difference.

Exhibit A: Neydo. The story is perfumes from dreams. I started smelling things in dreams a decade ago. I remember waking from one in which I vividly smelled Piguet’s Futur exactly as it was (a galbanum monster) and realizing I’d never done that before. The Neydo website actually does a little survey do find out whether you smell in dreams. I hope my readers will forgive me for skipping the rest of their BS and going straight to the fragrances.

Where Love Belongs: tedious and invasive creamy white floral.

Far Very Far: indeed hardly there at all.

Chasing Light: vanilla flavor for cakes.

Blond Redhead: trivial tobacco thing.

Breathe Out: the problem is that you’ve breathed in.

Alien Fruit: Duchaufour composed this?

Wood Haze: shampoo.

Mossland: the best of the lot, a basic fougère.

Berry Craving: fruit salad for 9-year-olds.

Fiery Fig: so thirty-years-ago.

Cloud Essence: not bad, an essay in white blandness.

Pulsation: fruity vape.

Price: £86 for 50 ml. Samples from Bloom Perfumery

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I was trying to find a word to describe one of the prevailing tendencies of artisan perfumery, the exotic-liturgical one full of incense and spices, midway between Christmas pudding and Christmas Mass. My word for it was moody. Tania suggested emo. Both work. As everyone knows, goths and emos are the most civilized tribes, once you get past the eyeliner and black lace. And indeed much of Artisan perfumery behaves like a kitten trying to scare a bigger beast, all puffed up and sideways but basically pink nose and tiny teeth. There are some resplendent exceptions to this trend, notably Hiram Green and Parfum d’Empire. They and others produce fragrances that do not suffer from posture problems, unfold to full stature, and could be worn by a windswept figurehead on a ship’s bow or by a helmeted statue of Athena Nikê.

When I got the Barre samples, I expected emo, hoped for goddess, and got something else altogether. These perfumes are professional, well-put together in a quiet way that made me think of Emile Ajar. It was a pseudonym for a very famous French writer who wanted a second Prix Goncourt, submitted a novel as a supposed rookie, and was eventually exposed despite his efforts at not sounding too practiced. If indeed these are artisan perfumes composed by “visual artist and independent perfumer Bree Hyland, made in her studio located in rural Mi’kma’ki, Nova Scotia,” then I must conclude either that the perfumer is channelling vast amounts of telepathic knowledge from 1970s Grasse or is armed with a grimoire of formulae a foot thick.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Barre perfumes is the drydown, where most artisan perfumery fails when one or two materials are left standing in the buff when the tide goes out. Barre drydowns, solidly aromachemical if am not much mistaken, are proper, classical accords. What makes them odd and exotic at this point is that they do not go for powerful materials and instead set a muted but distinctive scene. Barre perfumes, if I may switch metaphors, have the feel of an understated actor whose looks only gradually reveal themselves as part of their mutable character, someone like William Powell or Ralph Fiennes. They are so unfashionable as to be practically avant-garde.

For paid subscribers: reviews of Cult, Dolly, Volta, Witch and Outlaw.

Samples from Bloom Perfumery

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