THE CHINESE-OWNED MEGASTORES that proliferate throughout many countries in Europe have, it must be said, many advantages: their opening hours allow one to purchase necessities one has forgotten at all times of the day and week. And thus it was that I recently found myself in one of these establishments in the picturesque town of Sintra, in Portugal, a place with a tiny population but with six of these shops.
THE PURPOSE OF MY VISIT was to purchase yet another umbrella to help me deal with the remarkably English climate of this part of the country, but my eye was taken by a range of after shaves and EDTs (as "eau de toilette" has now become known), including the one pictured above, which is now the subject of some fascination for me.
THIS PRODUCT, "OBAMA", is, or rather was, a part of the range of EDTs produced by the company going by the name of "Shirley May", and which has a website visitable by those who wish to confirm my statements here. If one looks at the back of the box, one may see that Obama (and presumably the other products in the range) was made in the United Arab Emirates and is for distribution in the Ukraine and Moldova. The blurb on the back is mainly in Cyrillic characters, thus being rather mysterious.
THE ISSUE OF THE TRAGIC EVENTS in the Ukraine at the moment brought my attention back to this EDT, upon which I detected a certain symmetry between the fate of this Obama and world events in general. Obama has been removed from the Shirley May range, although other products, such as "Just Black", "Black Market", "Army Fight" and "Hero" are still for sale today. (Strangely, one of the EDTs is called "Blog", although I could not find it when I returned to the same shop two days ago.)
IN REAL LIFE, OF COURSE, the world is waiting for action on the part of Europe and the USA in order to stimulate the obstreperous Vladimir "Ras" Putin into action both over the Ukraine in general and over the shameful events taking place around the crash site of Malaysia Airlines MH17, but, David Cameron apart, no one seems to care.
AS FOR OBAMA ITSELF, my good lady wife has informed me that in her opinion it is extremely well packaged both on the box and the bottle inside, which looks extremely bold and strong on the dressing table. However, she tells me, after an initially forceful aroma it loses almost all of its promised effect very quickly indeed; so much so that if I spray it on in the morning after breakfast, one would swear that after no time at all there was nothing there.
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