Does nobody remember Balzac?*

Reporting that the Body Shop has gone into administration, the Today programme's Mishal Husain reminisced about the range of products that she and her schoolfriends had favoured: she had forgotten the name, but listeners came to the rescue, and the show was deluged with reminiscences, fond and not-so-fond, of Body Shop Dewberry. For the benefit of even older people, does anyone else remember Aqua Manda? Do your own image search to see the full glory of its packaging, but I genuinely did like the scent as well.

Over breakfast, I was reading an article in yesterday's Guardian about someone who set up a YouTube channel about her lifestyle of spinning, quilting and keeping chickens. She called it 'The Last Homely House', "which is a place to feel comfortable, secure and welcomed." Oddly, I thought of it as the last place of domestic comfort before you set off for the Misty Mountains.

*The title I gave this rather random post was intended to convey the theme of memory. It is possible that this precise wording exists only in my memory, but it is my version of a line from Pierrot le Fou: Belmondo's character laments the switch to purely numeric phone numbers (this summary proves that I have not entirely invented it).