Scents and sensibilities...

Do not, my friends, allow perfume to spill in your handbag.  This is particularly irksome if you don't realise it's happened until it's too late.  I'd been walking round all weekend thinking I could smell my perfume rather more than usual - and assuming it was just because I'd been squirting it with a slightly heavier hand.  Nope.  It was because the lid had come off.  Checked the bag.  Didn't seem to be any damage, or sogginess.  Evaporation.  Yes, that'd be why there was no trace of damp.  I sometimes remember bits of science, despite my best efforts to forget. 

Now I know that perfume, out of the bottle and into a bag, is capable of bleaching every single bit of ink from a railcard, thus rendering it invalid.  It's also capable of doing the same on two unused return tickets I had in the same wallet (about £25-worth of wasted ticket) and on all the receipts that I was saving for the tax man.  As the railcard saves me 1/3 on every trip I take to home and back, it had to be replaced.  Only problem was, no replacement is possible without the receipt.  Even if I'd had the receipt, I'd have had to pay £10 for ''administration fees''.  Gritted my teeth and paid £30 for a new one, fuming.   Handbag smells lovely, though...

Still, that notwithstanding, the gods were on my side today when Boots pretty much paid me to take away a load of Clarins; their current offer is ''buy a couple of things (which I planned to do anyway), we'll give you three freebies and a pretty bag, plus £10-worth of loyalty points''.  Decent enough deal.  Even more of a decent deal when by cunning chicanery, I was able to deploy not only a double points voucher for the purchase price, PLUS a ''200 extra points when you spend £20'' voucher; added to the £10-worth of points they were already giving me in the deal, AND an extra free item because the consultant obviously couldn't count, they were almost giving me the whole package for about £5.  I gave the extra freebie to Lady Oakwood.  She was delighted.  The 50ml moisturiser she received is worth about £35 on its own.  I also have one as part of the deal.  Happy days.

And, in another delightful ''mitigating the perfume and railcard debacle'' event, I found out today that one of the ophthalmologists is called Mr Lash...