I got back from London and -you might have guessed- spent a few good hours dealing with e-mails. Now, hurray!, shortly before diner, I am done with them and the parcels for tomorrows shipment with the truck for Italy is ready, too.

Time to write on the blog again. The last months were a bit restless, at least as far as my geographic position is concerned, remembering me in a job I had many years ago, when I was Mr. shaking machine, traveling with my shaking machine. I traveled the world with it. Lucky me today, I do not need to carry any laboratory equipment with me that might fail any minute to operate, like the shaking machine once did. We served India, the sales manager and the product manager (me), traveling from north to south and from the east to the west and the first day the machine went from alive to dead in 4 seconds. The rest of the journey saw us explaining a broken machine and saw spare part following us. This was years ago and it was virtually impossible to send spare parts fast enough from here to there…

Thus, my sales manager always told me “if you can’t inform them, confuse them”. This was exactly what we did, successfully.

Which brings me right to today’s line of perfume related thought. When visiting the British Museum and thinking incense and mummies and resins, I realized how different our approach to incense must be compared to theirs, 3000 years ago. They smelled the same molecules but what incense smelled like for them is beyond our event horizon. Thus, it is -in a sense- a vain enterprise to bring back these fragrances. We simply do not have the background to fully understand and appreciate how people 3000 years ago might have enjoyed it.

Perfumes are part of a cultural context.

But then, I am sure these Egyptian mummies smelled lovely when placed in their graves for eternity.