Tomorrow could be boring

Hello from the 19th century!

I haven't quite finished my perfumery course yet. I should have finished it by now but the kind boffins at Plymouth Uni have given me a merciful extension. Just before Christmas, I received a nice surprise: I was awarded a prize for 'the best student submission of 2011'. An actual academic accolade! Nothing that would really matter outside a very small circle of specialists, mind, but an accolade nevertheless. I've just about recovered from the shock. Mind you, this course probably only has about 6 current students...

I'll finally get to visit the perfume museum in Grasse at the end of this month. It's something I've wanted to do since at least 2005 and although the upcoming visit will only be a short one, I am looking forward to it as though it was a pilgrimage of some sort. Well - to me, it kind of is. I cringe at my own nerdyness but there you are.

This week I've read through Septimus Piesse's 19th century The Art of Perfumery and half of Eugene Rimmel's The Book of Perfumes. These are in virtual format. On my desk await a stack of course books and photocopies, plus Ellena's book (the translated version, alas), Ackerman's 'A Natural History of the Senses' (a library copy to see if I need to buy it or not) and 'Lethal Laws' (a book about animal testing I've been reading for work). Whilst all this is indeed fascinating (and somewhat necessary), I am anxious that I won't have time to read George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones before Eastercon (for which we're already booked! It seems that we keep going every other year no matter how much I mean to change that pattern). I'm ashamed to admit that I've come to The Game of Thrones via the TV-series rather than through literary fandom.

Not to mention that fellow T-party writing group members Gaie and Sara-Jayne have both had books out which I really very dearly wish to read soon! I've not been a member of the T Party for years now because I can't get to London for the meetings, but I have now joined a local off-shoot of sorts, partially populated by ex-members of the aforementioned group. It's been absolutely fantastic to actively participate in a writing group again and it has re-invigorated that side of my life.

Meanwhile, I am very quietly hopeful that this year there may be more opportunities for me to do actual perfume work. The Christmas product I scented became a best-seller (probably mostly due to its colourful design but the scent had to play its part, surely?).

It's disappointing that my need for some form of time travel/time stop device is yet to be fulfilled but I suppose things could be far worse. I'm having quite a lot of fun lately, even if it does take half a day to excavate a path outdoors from underneath the piles of books.

Roses and festivals

This month I have been mostly smelling of roses and attending festivals. If you're interested in what happened in Turkey during the rose harvest, head on over here - and if you'd like to see my Hipstamatic snapshots from this week's festival, check them out here.

 

R.I.P. BNTBTBB

The third instalment of Study Notes is now out at Basenotes. Follow my adventures as a student of perfumery. And a complete fan-girl.

The great illustration is, again, by the lovely and talented Grant Osborne. I adore his style!

Meanwhile, if you're interested in perfumes at all and happen to be around London in July, you might want to head to http://www.gorillaperfume.com and register for a bit of a bizarre olfactory event (you can visit free between 14th and 18th of July).

'tis the time for scanners and printers to explode!

We've moved to Farnham. It's an old market town, fairly rural, but still close-ish to London. Timo's new journey to work will take about an hour by train and another half an hour by tube. My trip to Poole will be shortened significantly and will take similar sort of time if all goes well. So geography certainly influenced our choice.

Yet there is an extra quality about this place - something I was trying to explain to Timo before he'd been - it's a little bit out-of-time, an imaginary England not quite stuck in the past, but neither apparently present in our world. It's how I imagined England to be before I came here, almost 18 years ago. Of course my ideas were quickly crushed by Streatham, Old Kent Road, Elephant & Castle, New Cross Gate, Peckham, Morden and all those lovely South London places. Years living in greasy flats above chip shops, damp basements and ex-council blocks made me hate London. I'm sure I would have loved London a lot more, had I lived in a W8 terrace.

And I do love London too. I love its theatres, museums, colleges, parks, shops, buzz, ideas and people. The mishmash of cultures and languages. But like a rich pudding, it can only be enjoyed in small doses. I have always had a tendency to absorb a great deal from my surroundings and it's useful when creating because inspiration and ideas seem to fly out of my head with ease, but there is a saturation point. This point is reached very quickly in London these days. It's too stimulating. Exhilarating in small doses.

Our new home is a dinky one bedroom house. We're renting it for (what what we hope for is a) shortish period before buying our own place around here. The mortgage and housing market is scary at the moment, so these plans are not much more than hopes for now.

There are beautiful woods and parks, cobbled streets, old architecture, friendly people and nice little shops. We do now live right next to the train track, so the current nuisance (still preferable to a chip shop) is the house-train-effect. Every time a train goes past, the building vibrates. There are several cracks on the walls and ceilings, which the owner pointed out to us when we moved in. I definitely wouldn't buy this place.

Timo and I have decided that at night, when we're drifting off to sleep and the train rumbles and the house vibrates, we imagine that we're on a big sleeper house-train, journeying somewhere new and exciting. It's that, or constantly stress about the noise. 

We seem to be on a neighbourhood cat-path. There's a tabby, black, bushy ginger and a half-moustachioed Poirot cat. They skulk past our patio doors to the woods opposite.

I finally have my new computer. We can't get broadband connected until mid-January, so it's been a little ironic to stare at the shiny new machine without being able to do much on it. Not to mention the irritation of troublesome new printer installation. Well, we've not managed to install it, put it that way. It's driven Timo to declare he never wants to see another bit of technology again (a threat which was immediately broken as he hurried back to his game of Civ).

And there's another kind of headexplody-risk around here - this one for the idea-rich/time-poor/impatiently wanting to try and learn and do too much-type Barbara Sher calls Scanners. At my fingertips in this town, I have opportunities to rekindle Russian (something I've wanted to do for a long time), learn to ride a horse (something my mother promised me when I was a child, but then never followed through), go on drawing and illustration classes, learn yoga, go to theatre, go see sock puppets, opera streamed directly from The Met, learn pottery, fabric printing, jewellery making... and I could go on. I have had to force myself to put all this to one side for now and argue that it'll all be still there once I've completed my perfumery and chemistry studies, written my nonfiction cosmetics industry novel and finished my picture book. I am wearing a wry smile as I write this, but the crazy part is that there is a crazy part in me that believes I can do all this stuff. This place is a scanner's dream or nightmare. Depends on your outlook.

Chemicals and mind-crushes

Isn't the picture Grant drew adorable? It makes more sense if you read my new column at Basenotes. This is the second in the series, entitled "A Very English Problem".

I've also got a new mind-crush in the form of Dara O'Briain. His rant about homeopathy and nutritionists is brilliant. Best quote: "Science knows it doesn't know everything or it would have stopped."

I brought back a toxic book from the library: "Toxic Beauty: How Hidden Chemicals in Cosmetics Harm You." It's written by a Reiki-healer who is convinced she knows what she's talking about, a bit like an astrologer might be convinced she knows better about heavenly bodies after talking to some people at NASA. I would despair, but luckily I've built up some resistance to this by now and my own chemistry studies are adding a whole new backbone to the way I view these scare-mongering messages nowadays. Once I finish my course I should really focus on the book I've been researching for the past few years and get it out there. It's time people stopped worrying about insignificant things and started worrying about stuff that could cause real harm instead. To themselves, to the environment and ultimately to the existence of human life itself. Trust me, whether we ingest a bit of lipstick isn't on that list.

The trouble with being a science student

I read a lot and I think a lot.

I don't want to live forever, but I'd like a way of knowing what happens to the world, the human race, the Universe and everything.

There are days when I wonder what the point of living is, given that it's likely we'll [the Universe] either crunch or expand out of existence anyway, so even if we somehow [rather improbably at this point] manage to colonise space, there will be precisely zero left of all of our weighty human efforts at the end of it all.

Of course if there's a crunch, there will hopefully be a new Big Bang as a result of it (which makes one wonder how many Universes there have been before ours), but that'll be like shaking the celestial Etch-a-Sketch and starting again, with no trace of our "achievements"; just the building blocks everything is made up of.

Have a nice day!

Study Notes - a column about perfume studies

Basenotes, the family-owned and run perfume shrine with over 13.000 listed fragrances, industry news and a lively community has a new columnist. I'm hoping to make it a monthly series about being an adult distance-learner of perfumery and a trainee perfumer. For those of you who have been wondering who I work for, wonder no longer. The article contains the answer.

I still can't quite believe any of this is happening. It has been a bizarre journey. And this is only the beginning! I might still manage to somehow spectacularly cock it up. That'd make entertaining reading, but please cross your fingers for more of a positive outcome.

(Illustration by Grant Osborne)

A sonnet in jasmine

It's incredibly frustrating to dream in Shakespeare and write in picture book script. In perfumery, I have such flights of fancy in my olfactory cortex, but my skills aren't up to it yet. I wish I could spend an alternative lifetime in Grasse, piggybacking inside the head of an offspring of a formidable perfume famille whilst he learns the vocabulary of the craft. Memorises notes.

Sort of like Sam(antha) Beckett in France.

I have limited opportunities to start that process now. Depending on the success of my first attempts, maybe those opportunities will increase. I know that I will use every one of them fully.

Actually, when I say "start" - that's a little misleading; I have already been building up a catalogue of notes in my head - not just from childhood, noticing smells perhaps more strongly than others, but I mean the part where you consciously try to commit specific odours to memory. That started with the delivery of my first oils and chemicals, back in 2005.

Still. I feel like I've just about got the hang of "Hello, how are you? Nice to meet you." The part where you discuss matters of the heart and soul still eludes me. I'm determined to learn (as always).

There is the IFEAT Diploma in Perfumery, which I've been salivating about since I found out about it. Anyone have a spare £2000 knocking around?

You've got to start somewhere

It's funny how at school, I couldn't wait to get out of there, but now, I wish I could keep on studying. I suppose adult education and further studies are nifty things. They cater for this.

I was on self-imposed course ban for a couple of years so that I could focus on other things. I still did the space sausage thing and a couple of other things (shh).

For some time, I have been experimenting with a steadily growing obsession; making perfume and cosmetics (and I've written about this before here and here). It's something that ties right back to when I worked part-time after school at the local superstore. Or maybe it goes even further back - to the stuffing of grandmother's rose petals into a glass bottle full of water and hoping it would turn into perfume. I've heard some others tell the same stories, except that for me the fascination never ended. I've ended up working either in, or adjacent to the cosmetics industry for the majority of my life.

I almost quit the whole industry a while back. I tend to get irritated (ok, burst into spontaneous rants) when I see deliberately misleading advertising about cosmetics, companies putting profits ahead of honesty and all those aspects we know are part of selling that next face cream or scent. I also happen to be quite business minded and definitely don't begrudge making profit. It's the core part of why business is business. I just refuse to believe that there can't be a way to run an honest cosmetics business that still makes a healthy profit.

For years I really couldn't find one. I worked for several, respected many of them, but ultimately they all seemed to play the same game.

Meanwhile, I worked in IT and other things; missing the fun parts of the cosmetics industry, but shuddering every time I'd remember the not so nice elements.

Now I work for a cosmetics company that is perhaps at the other extreme of the scale. In many ways it's more of a campaigns and pressure group. I'm enjoying this change to the norm and it's been refreshing and liberating.

And I feel like I've been given permission to dig deeper. I want to go to the next level. So I've looked up a couple of routes through which I could qualify in Cosmetic Science and registered on the first pre-requisite course, which is due to start on the 1st of March. This feels very, very exciting.

Attack of the space sausage!

The Learning Day at Escape studios was great fun, if totally exhausting. I can't remember the last time I felt that (mentally) wiped out. And really, that was a bit unexpected after only a deceptively simple set of exercises. I think it's the mental tiredness I used to experience when working in IT; something I haven't encountered for a long while. When you've intensely concentrated for several hours on the trot and have had to assimilate a lot of information in a short time. Maybe a bit like being in Higher Education (that's if you're actually trying to learn, versus spending your time in the pub...).

In the last two years I might have worked hard physically, but it's a different sort of tired.

When I got home last night I had something to eat, watched Chicken Run (with newfound respect, I must add) and fell asleep on the bed. Was woken up by Timo's call at around 1am: "I'm leaving work." The poor sod had a stupid-busy day.

The software packages we used at Escape were Shake and Maya. I felt immediately at home with Shake; sure, it wasn't simple, but at the same time it felt really intuitive and the concepts were fairly familiar. I've done enough Photoshop work and I "get" certain things more easily than others, so the Shake part of the day was definitely enjoyable on that level. In fact, I wished we could have done more with it. When I begun to understand the power of this package, it was time to stop. It definitely left me wanting to explore it further.

Not so much with Maya. I've had the Maya personal learning edition installed for a while, but unlike Photoshop, which I was able to just play around with in the beginning, until I started learning how to use it properly... well, my experience with Maya was definitely not the same! When I'd looked around it before, I just felt overwhelmed. It didn't seem to have a natural way to learn by trial and error because even to do the simplest thing, you'd have to know some of the basics about the interface and various tools. So you have to have an understanding of it even to get started.

Hence why this introduction to the package seemed like a good way to start; to just get an idea of what Maya was like; just to see whether it'd be something I could get my head around and to possibly even enjoy, or to do something useful with.

Our first task was to get somewhat familiar with the interface. So we made a simple ball shape and animated it to make it bounce. This eased us into the software. So far so good. I didn't fall behind, crash the software, or make my ball resemble a Sea Urchin (like some others in the class). Awesome.

Then, we were asked to open a file with two elements already in place: a human hand (with one digit missing; an odd-looking four-fingered hand) - and a polygon block floating above it. We were informed that the task would be to shape the hand out of the block. So far so good. The beginning all made sense; how to modify the polygon shapes into resembling the hand's structure; how to use the different views available, etc, etc.

However, at the point which the tutor had modelled two perfect fingers, my hand was more like a fairly creepy multi-digit space sausage. At least I hadn't created a zig-zagged 3D chess board like the student sat next to me.

Still. A space sausage. So, by this time I felt uncomfortable and like I'd just fallen off the wagon; the tutor had moved onto explaining skinning and I still had one of the four digits missing and the remaining ones wiggling at me, all misshapen and sausage-y from the screen.

In the end, we animated the "hand" to wave bye-bye. I'm thinking I could apply for SFX in horror films.

I stayed behind to chat with the tutor, who, incidentally, had started from a similar background to mine - from drawing and illustration to software and so on. She'd gone down the animation route fairly early on and I have a feeling that this is the crucial difference; I seem to be happier and more intrigued by the still image and by the 2D (or 2-and-a-half-D, as described by our Shake tutor) world. I expressed my doubts to the Maya tutor and she told me not to be so discouraged. She also mentioned that Maya is also a powerful texturing/skinning tool and that those skills are extremely useful in the industry.

Overall, I really enjoyed my Learning Day. It was exactly what I had hoped - a glimpse into the world of cutting edge digital effects, and a way for me to assess whether it'd be worth trying to learn any of these packages.

I think my next software investment will be Corel's Painter 9 (or whatever version will be out by the time I can afford the price tag!). I doubt I'll be delving much deeper into 3D. I don't have the hunger for it - and the work does not happen by magic. Those packages are a tool, just like Photoshop is - the work is only going to be as good as the skills and patience of the user.

However, if 3D would be something that I'd want to pursue career-wise, then Escape Studios would be a very good way to get into it. I'd recommend them on many levels - the tutors all have extensive industry experience, or are currently working in the industry - and the studios and equipment all seemed appropriate and professional.

A modified version of this post was cross-posted to BlogCritics.

My only warning would be: take a packed lunch. And a book. Because at lunch, or breakfast, or just about any other time of the day, you may not want to go out. Sheperd's Bush (at least the bit around the studios/Tube) is a DUMP. Hobos falling over on the road; two branches of McDonald's within 500 metres of oneanother, a KFC, some dodgy all-you-can-eat buffet, a small Starbucks with sullen staff, a slum shopping centre with a Morrisons. Nice.