On perfume. (It’s not Tuesday, I know, but I was busy.)

The word inspiration also means breathing in...

When I was a kid, women had one bottle of perfume and wore it on special occasions. You put it on after your best clothes and your earrings. You dabbed it on occasionally until it had turned into something that looked lovely but smelled a bit like vinegar. (We didn't know in those days that scent deteriorated in daylight so our mums would take it out of the packaging and stand it on their dressing tables to impress visitors.)

My mother had one bottle of Chanel No.5 that my French pen-friend's family had given me to bring back to Geordieland for her. It was massive. There is stood on the modernist dressing table, decomposing nicely until it smelled foul, but as we didn't know what Chanel No. 5 was supposed to smell like, she wore it anyway.

For an ordinary Sunday tea with friends or coffee at a smart cafe, you'd wear Avon or Lentheric that someone had got you for your birthday.

When I was 16 I bought my first bottle of proper scent. We were in Dundee, at a department store; we were holiday nearby. I'd just sat my exams and was about to go into sixth form, sufficiently grown up, I'd decided, to wear a beautiful fragrance. I'd saved up; I had cash. Looking back, I appreciate that the saleswoman was very kind to me. (Since then, I've met some apallingly snooty scent sellers.) She enjoyed my excitement and treated me like an adult with opinions of my own. She let me try several scents, gradually finding out what it was that appealed to me and finally took out her Diorella tester.
"I think you'll like this," she said, "It smells to me of overripe peaches." She was right, super-right, more right than I'd imagined possible. She had found me the most overwhelmingly gorgeous scent. It was simply the most beautiful smell that had ever wound its way to my olfactory nerve endings. I wanted to jump into its fragrant cloud and inhale forever. I was totally faithful to it for four years.

After that I was seduced by Chanel Cristalle, Yves Saint Laurent's Champagne (which was surpressed by France's Champagne producers then reappeared years later as Ivresse). Guerlain's Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat distracted me for a while then I dabbled in sundry citruses.
Decades after I found my partner perfume, I went searching for another. I have many fragrant friends, including the one and only bottle of Lynx Sarah McCartney - really - but I found the liquid love of my adult life in Paris, on another quest, at a small shop that my husband found for me. He tells me he doesn't regret it.

Editions de Parfum Frederic Malle is an interesting place. The chap himself invited the world's top perfumers to create any scent they wanted to, with no restriction on cost. Natural materials vary between £5 and £2000 a kilo. Synthetics are cheaper and that's what you get in most of the 21st Century scents you'll be attacked with as you cross the threshhold of a department store perfumery.

There we were in the small, dark, intensely modern shop. To smell the scents, you sniff a column of pure, fresh air perfumed only with the fragrance of your choice. You smell the effect you will have as you waft by. Once you've sniffed, the chamber is whooshed clear, ready for you to smell the next one. Just like my first time, the assistant asked me to describe the scents I usually like and I told her that I wanted one that reminded me of red berries. She filled the tube with Lipstick Rose and I fell for it instantly. Now, I carry it with me everywhere in a small, black metal tube and sometimes I allow other people a bit of a squirt if they ask very nicely. Their Dans tes Bras perfume reminds me of the way I used to smell at the end of a day at the beach: sea water, suntan lotion, skin, damp sand, sunsets, happiness. I'm very fond of that one too.

I still dabble, notably at B Never Too Busy to be Beautiful, where the stunning scents (also made with no limit on materials costs) are the best value for money that you will find in the world of fine perfumery. I love Superword Unknown and Two Hearts Beating as One. L'Artisan Parfumeur has several that I love, including Bois Farine ("Biscuits!" said my goddaughter, Bella) and Vanilia.

The thing about scent is that is it evocative, hard-hitting in an intensely emotional way. The nerve endings for our sense of smell are unprotected from the big wide world, unlike touch where skin is a barrier between the stimulus and the brain, so it deadens the feeling. The place we first detect a smell is close to the emotional centre of our brains so we are vulnerable to the effect of a stray smell that takes us inawares.

Find a scent that makes you smile, lifts you up and takes you to a pleasant place and you'll have yourself an emotional time-travel machine, an instantly intoxicating, inspiring tool. Dab, inhale, wait, create. I think I'll just have myself a quick helping of Lipstick Rose as I settle down to write. That should last me the morning.

Footnote: the film
Seek out a copy of Jasminum, a Polish film about perfume, love and other things. Ignore the badly translated subtitles and use them as a means to indicate what the characters really meant to say. I'm waiting for someone to watch it and bring out a Bird Cherry fragrance.

Footnote 2: the shops
Buying scent is not everyone's idea of fun. If you'd like me to help you, email and I shall. Really. First stop is Liberty, London W1 and head for the Frederic Malle collection on the ground floor. Say hello to Peggy and Albertino and tell them I scent you. Liberty's perfume collection is marvellous, but the service is unpredictable and you do need help. You might find a helpful, knowledgeable chap, but you might not. Ormonde Jayne in the orange Georgian arcade off Bond Street is just lovely too. Department stores are difficult. People are there to sell their particular brand not help you in your quest. The Arabian perfume shop opposite Selfridges on Oxford Street is an experience, and their scents are beautiful too. When you're in Paris, go to Detaille, Rue St. Lazarre. In New York, you want Bond No. 9.

Footnote 3: I mean it about helping you out. When you find the scent you were born to wear there will always be a beautiful place you can go to cheer yourself up, rain or shine. Now that I've found mine, my quest is to help the rest of the world find theirs.

PS By the way, I recently rediscovered Diorella. Although it's slightly different from decades ago (they reformulate now and again) it's still marvellous and makes me feel as though I've just passed all my O levels and my life is just beginning.

At the Proms

On Sunday night, we were at the Albert Hall to see a Promenade concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We got some Beethoven (4th Symphony - which I'd heard before but couldn't remember). First there was a very modern piece which used three sets of timpani and the biggest collection of percussion I've ever seen, plus two harps which you couldn't hear for the percussion. Fun to watch though. You could observe the action while listening to the sounds, and let your mind wander off to the music and see where it took you. It sounded like a film score, passing through a ghost story, science fiction, a bit of 1950s black and white cowboy film (the bit where they're parched with thirst in the desert) ending with some huge explosions as the goodies triumph in the end. During the interval, we compared notes, and we'd all pictured the same things: Nick, who doesn't normally listen to orchestral music, Alex, (18) who's got a place at the Guildhall and performs classical music, and me, who got grade 8 clarinet in 1978 and was brought up on the stuff.

After the interval we got Berlioz' Te Deum. The choir had at least 300 people in it. 100 boys, 100 men and 100 women that I could count and I couldn't see them all. We'd a huge orchestra, four each of the woodwinds, five horns and trombones, two tubas, four(+?) trumpets, a row of side drums and one of cymbals. Watching the cymbal players was fantastic. Once every 15 minutes or so there'd be a couple of huge crashes, then the four of them would sit down again, carefully placing their kit into their custom-made stands. The trick was to spot out of the corner of your eye when they stood up, when they lifted the cymbals out, lined them up, then wallop!

At the back was a bloke with a substantial stomach who sat perfectly still for at least 40 minutes, then started to twiddle with his cufflinks. Then he opened his book and finally stood to sing. A wonderful tenor voice wafted around this huge space.

The best bit was the loudest; call me crass, but I'm standing by my claim; if you go to hear Berlioz, you want noise. The Bertie Hall organ is not to be messed with. We were way, way up, so high that if we lobbed a peanut off the circle it would take a good few seconds to hit the promenaders on the floor below. When the organ crashed out a huge chord, from bass pipes so massive you couldn't wrap your arms round them, and all 300 voices, basses to trebles, hit their notes, I burst into tears. I always do.

I count things. I think that there were around 3000 people in the audience (400 or so were the choir's mums, dads, brothers and sisters), but there were still some spare seats. I've not been to a Prom for years and yet it's only a 20 tube ride from my house. It's the biggest orchestral music event in the world, it's on my doorstep, each concert is wonderful. Yet along with another several million Londoners I don't shift myself off my office chair to go there often enough. The Albert Hall is glorious in its Victorian opulence, with its red and gold garments and its curiously intimate feel for such a vast space. Human civilisation started in the mud and several billions of years later it comes together in a round hall in SW1. The choir was singing to the glory of God, but for me this was the glory of the Big Bang and aeons of evolution.

Why don't we go? Well, because we've seen the Last Night of the Proms on television, all union flags and prats jumping up and down to Rule Britannia so we think it's for the white middle classes. Or we think it'll be sold out, or we think it's expensive. It's none of those things. We paid £11 each to sit down and Alex stood in the second row from the front for a fiver last Tuesday. It's less than the cinema. You can listen, you can watch, you can panic a bit when the organ player starts to flip his score backwards and forwards and you think he's lost his place! In front of me there were a couple of young teenage boys I bet had never been to a classical concert before; they'd come to watch their brother in the choir. At the very, very end of the final applause, when the choirmasters had been on and off three times and the tenor had been on and off twice, and the conductor finally left the stage and indicated that her orchestra could pack up, one of them clapped and clapped until he was sure he was the absolute last one. I leaned forward.
"You won," I said to him.
"I know!" he said delighted, "I was trying hard."

Which is why everyone should grab the chance to get down there. It'll fill you to bursting with things you've never felt before. It made me want to spring the Symphony 1010 clarinet from its case, make red and gold clothing for winter and unpack the spare speakers so I can have music in my office. Even if it just inspires you to be the last man clapping, don't miss it.