Mill Hill Souk Awesomeness

Had the best time at the Mill Hill Souk. Having frantically spent the previous fortnight rushing around like a headless chicken, it was a relief just to kick back on the day having done all the legwork. This was most definitely the most fun I’ve had at one of these pop-up events; it was just a wonderful group of people and we all gelled. Plus, the sun came out! How amazing was that? We resolutely ignored the hail and wind that started off the day and by noon North London was awash with bright sunlight. I think we all got a bit giddy with the excitement and there was just such a buzz. Plus, I sold loads and got to meet some of the nicest customers I’ve ever met. There is nothing better than seeing someone fall in love with something you made, right before your eyes. Pure magic. As you can see, we got a shout-out pretty much immediately on the day – those new pots of 50ml cream are super-popular and everyone liked the new eco-certified linen bags which were being used for the first time. Ultimately, I loved every minute of it so a huge thank you to Josephine who arranged it, and Irate (yes, you read that right 🙂 ) who hooked me up. We are already planning another one for May so watch this space

Warm Sunshine!!!

What else? Met a friend for dinner in Richmond. We were supposed to be going to the Ivy Cafe but couldn’t get a table till 8.30pm so ended up at Bill’s instead. Really good meal, and our waitress was really nice. Great time until we left and I realised I never looked to see which road I parked in. Richmond, how much do I hate you? It took me 50 minutes to find the car, looking like a demented woman as I kept pointing and pressing the lock button in the hope that my lights would flash. Finally found it after walking all the way back to the restaurant and trying to retrace my steps by instinct. Plus, I’d done my usual insane thing of dressing in some flimsy number as I was only walking from car to restaurant. Big mistake! So, 50 mins to find the car, 10 mins to drive to Chiswick. Blue fingers, blue lips, frozen toes.I still can’t believe I did such a pea-brained thing. Made up for it by having an epic Sunday lunch at The Lamb in Chiswick. I totally disregarded my Mother’s advice to never eat anything bigger than my own head. The roast beef was awesome; I even ate the crispy, caramelised onions which will amaze everyone who knows me. I hate onions with a passion – that weird, translucence you get with cooked onions is just plain wrong. And don’t even get me started on the slimy texture. Double eek! However, these were onion-nirvana. The Lamb, absolutely recommend it.

Sunday Lunch Of The Gods
The Lamb, Chiswick

Well, onwards and upwards. I’m looking for a pop-up store or a shared one in London for May/June; if you know of a reasonably priced one, please drop me a line via our contact form. I’m hoping and praying that we will all have survived coronarmageddon. I can’t leave you without sharing some Coronavirus gallows humour. Bear in mind that as a pharmacist, I’m one of the front line staff; if we can’t find a laugh in our stressful workday, it’ll all go downhill pretty fast.

Take care of yourselves out there and if you take one piece of advice on board, never mind hand sanitizer, wash your hands thoroughly and frequently. It might save you from 3 weeks of nasty respiratory distress. Have a safe week.

/by

I know What I like

An Alara Original – this will be worth tens of pounds any day now 🙂

What have I been doing lately? Well, I’ve been having my portrait painted. Swank, eh? I know, I know, I ought to have been immortalised in paint ages ago, the whole nation cries 🙂 Still, here we are. I’d been asked a couple of times before (not counting the sleazy offers of ‘you could be a model, do you want some pictures taken?’) and never felt like it but it just gelled this time. Sitting for an artist is a very interesting experience. I would say I’m quite a still person, trained by hours of church services and zero-tolerance science teachers (or sadists as they’re called these days….) so I was surprised to see how much I talk with my whole body. Never mind talking with one’s hands, my entire body is hypermobile. Who knew? The most (or least?) infinitesimal movement changed the light and thus the painting so my poor exasperated portraitist had her work cut out. I took some photos of the initial slash -and- daub painting. When the final portrait is done, I’ll post it so you can see her work. She’s very talented.

Seeing as I dabble as well, we talked art throughout. We had pretty similar tastes but where I think Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are superlative artists, she hates them but for precisely the same reason which is funny. I like the works because they are true to the artists – they are totally misanthropic and are crystal-clear in intent. It’s not pretty, but it’ss very good work. She hates them precisely because they’re so talented and hate people so much. We both love Jackson Pollock.

Lucien in his glory
Another chocolate-box Francis Bacon painting……
My boy Jackson

It made me really think about how and why I paint. My works are very mannered, and she was encouraging me to just take to the canvas and see what happens as I don’t paint like that. I’ve always thought it was because it’s not my style but really thinking about it, I think most artists paint and get their inner turmoil on canvas/metal/whatever. I paint to express inner calm: it’s the order I want to put down, not the chaos. Essentially, I see pattern everywhere: I constantly add, divide, factorise numbers, make words from letters, see patterns in everything. No matter how chaotic the system – clouds, gales, waves, fluttering leaves – I always feel I can just see the pattern if I only looked hard enough but I can never see it.

Read more
/by

I Declare This Spring ….Open

Be there….

So how was good old Storm Ciara for you? First of all, I think naming storms and other weather events ought to be banned on aesthetic grounds. It always sounds so horribly faux-American. Sounds OK when they’re being super-dramatic on CNN, not so much on Radio Dartford. Could all parties now cease and desist forthwith. So, Sunday found me leaving home at some ungodly hour, headed for Manchester. Of course, it was for work – only the strongest work ethic would have got me out of my house on that day. Did I live to regret it? You bet. The journey took eight and a half hours. How much did I hate my life? Let me count the ways. Luckily I was travelling with three friends so it was quite good fun but honestly, I could have flown to Florida (OK, NYC) in the time it took to travel 200 miles. I realised why I had to go from what occured the next day but still……Not a happy bunny and I was totally exhausted by the time I came home on Monday.

Rest, you say? Ha! I’m thick in the midst of getting ready for the above. Now THAT I’m looking forward to. I’ve been frantically sourcing new eco-friendly packaging so I’m looking forward to launching that. Plus, the new 50ml sizes of the body creams are being launched and if our face creams are ready in time, they’ll be going on sale too. Someone said to me recently ‘You don’t sleep much, do you?’ Tell me about it. Success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, and in my case, I’m relying on 100% Divine Intervention so I’m golden 🙂 I hope you will come and see us, and buy something! Artisans shall not live by praise alone. Besides, it’s February, the days are still too short, you’re not doing anything crazy like proposing just because it’s a leap year. How else can you cheer yourself up? Start each day with the lovely aromas of Alara products – you’ll smell fantastic and your skin will feel like silk. Plus it’s free entry, music to the ears of my personal inner cheapskate. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I leave you with my current favourite cheesy pick-up line: “Are you a parking ticket? Because you’ve got FINE written all over you.” I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist. Happy Valentine’s Day.

/by

All About The Love

Is it Christmas already?!!!
St. Val’s Goodies

Mesdames et Messieurs, happy Monday. In the spirit of peace, prosperity, and friendship with all nations (please note the Oxford comma 🙂 ), I greet you in French and bring you tidings of winning entries. Drumroll!!! The winners of our ‘Merry New Year’ prize draw are: Hazel Ahmad, Pat Danning, and Corina Naish. Commiserations with those who did not win this time but there will be other draws so bonne chance. Lucky ladies, please send us your address via the contact form and your prize will wing its way to you mos’ def before Valentine’s Day.

Even if you didn’t win this time, Valentine’s Day need not be a busted flush. As we’ve said on FB – Valentine’s Day: Do you wish to receive cheap, scratchy red lingerie? Thought not. Order a mix of fabulously-scented gift-wrapped goodies from AlaraApothecary and avoid gift-shaming in 2020. AlaraApothecary: Relationship Superheroes.

You just need to leave this post open on your laptop tactically, and job done. Select a mix of products and we will gift-wrap them and dispatch them in time for Feb 14th as long as you order by the 10th of February. Post-it notes and arrows may be a powerful reinforcement in cases involving hardened clueless partners but we have to say they lack subtlety. As for the hardcore Valentine’s Day ‘bah-humbuggers’, we have catered for you as well. – we would never ignore you. This joke is for you:

A business tycoon spent his life amassing great wealth, neglecting his resigned wife and children. As he got older he became obsessed with the efforts he had made and his legacy. Being a self-made man, he decided to make sure the undeserving didn’t profit from his demise. He made his wife promise on a stack of bibles that she would bury his money with him Egyptian-pharaoh style. Come the dreaded day, our friend shuffled off this mortal coil. His lawyer was surprised to see his rather chipper wife practically skipping out of the cemetery. “Mrs Bloggs, how are you doing? I’ve been wondering how you will manage given your husband’s instructions regarding his estate.” Mrs Bloggs replied, “Dear Mr Sueandgrabbit, as you know I promised to bury my husband’s money with him. We had a joint account – I wrote him a cheque and put it in his coffin.” It’s the way we tell ’em. Have a lovely week.

/by

Beliefs & Doubts

First of all, maximum kudos to Her Majesty. I had cause to drive through Windsor yesterday (thank you so much Highways Agency for shutting down three M4 junctions….) and it got me thinking about power and how hanging on to it is not for dummies. The Queen is wilier than Wily.E.Coyote. Putting aside royalty’s penchant for bumping off inconvenient rivals to the throne, you can’t rely on plain murder and mayhem; after all, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown and all that. The sheer wizadry of the smokes and mirrors sleight of hand pulled off by the monarchy is a masterclass in pragmatic politics. Forget Megzit, put this 93-year old in charge of Brexit! Having the commonsense to ignore the rabid demands to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Elizabeth R realises that when you have a couple of rock stars at your disposal, it’s better to to keep them in the tent……. Because love them or hate them, Harry and Meghan alone in that entire family are blessed children, they’re sprinkled with star dust. It’s not fair but that’s life. So, the Queen apparently casts them off while leaving loopholes that you could drive a carriage through in case the family needs them to return. Respect! The best bit is witnessing the incoherent rage of H&M haters club. They know they’ve been stitched up, they just don’t know exactly how or why. If you think I’m wrong about the utter lack of desolation that the media etc would have us believe is engulfing the palaces, answer me this: if you have a nightmarish family member who wishes to leave you, brushing the dust of your family enclave from their shoes, never to return and this is what you also wish for, do you,

a) tell them “Begone, into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth”, or

b) pay off the £2.4 million it cost to renovate their home and let them keep that home, gratis, just in case they wish to come back and live 10 minutes away from you, the only ones in your family to do so.

I rest my case, m’lud. Point of all this, it made me think of perseverance. Yesterday was really hard, I think I just hit a wall. I’ve worked so hard at AlaraApothecary and I just seem to keep banging my head against a ceiling. So, there I was in church at the evening service and I remembered a cogent saying: ‘You can doubt your beliefs, you can believe your beliefs, but never believe your doubts’ It’s why I use my own products all the time. Just once in a while, I use something I haven’t used for a while and when the aroma fills the room, I think “This is soooo good!” It keeps me enthusiastic . Once more onto the fray I go. If I don’t put my products out there, I won’t find stockists. And even if people cannot stock them at present, each encounter is useful for learning what to do, or not do. Good luck in all our enterprises this week. Toodle pip.

/by