return of the gratitute attitude #2

hello there

and a very warm welcome indeed to all you fellow enthusiasts for the noble hobby of writing letters to companies in the business of producing - and lest we forget selling - personal hygiene products. warmth would be nice, look you see, for it is cold here. we have an enormous amount of slush, and it is rather cold. more on this later.

no, actually more on that now, before we get to the subject of another response off of a company that makes things like soap and that.

today i had to go out in the most treacherous of conditions. we have a number of centimetres of snow and slush on the roads and paths. from a walking perspective, it means you are basically mincing along sticking your feet into buckets of ice water, causing your feet to freeze. after a few steps you can no longer feel your feet, and after several more you find yourself recalling those hazy days when you could actually feel your legs as they worked.

that picture is from earlier in the week; the driving snow that bombarded my face made it impossible to take a picture today - using my phone would have seen it get frozen or something.

at one point i was just about resigned to losing the will to live. the only thing that allowed me to press onwards, to not simply curl up in a ball in the uncharted wastelands of High Green, was clutching at the hope of getting home and putting on a pair of very shiny polyester based strides what i had bought of British Home Stores, or if you like BHS. i have them on now.

why did i go out in such uncivilised and barbaric conditions? what was the agenda? why did i have no choice at all but to go out and face all but certain doom? why, to post some toothpaste to New Zealand of course. an action which led to a thorough interrogation by the staff of the Post Office, and further an action that cost me £13.60 in real money, no less.

but enough of my plight. for now. you want to read of my exploits in reaching out to various personal hygiene product people across the land, do you not. well, this we can do, as yesterday i got another letter from someone that i had written to. a response, if you like.

Mr, or indeed Ms or even Mrs, Garnier was or in a very real sense were the people who elected to send a response to me this time. this pleased me a very great deal, as of all the letters i sent, this was the one i was most excited about.

why would that be the case? well, the picture here gives you a clue, but you people who have been reading this blog over the years (i don't know why you do but thank you) will know exactly why. they are the last company standing, so far as i am aware, that make shampoo which has got lemon shoved into it.

yes, i appreciate the parallels here to me and my father. just as he insists on using toothpaste that has got lovebeads shoved into it, so too i prefer using shampoo what has had lemon shoved into it. the difference, if i may be so bold as to commit the difference to publication, is that if i were not able to get lemon shampoo i would simply get another type that had some other form of fruit (the more citrus the better) shoved into it. my Dad, as we are all too aware, is rather more of a mind to simply command his elder son to get some and post it to him should he not be able to find it himself. a slight difference, granted, but one that i felt was worth highlighting.

anyway, the letter. as it turned out, my letter got somewhat out of hand, and went on for a bit longer than i expected it to. you might, dear reader, want to consider the option of getting a cup of tea or coffee at the ready before reading the letter i sent to the Garnier of unspecified gender.

Dear Garnier

I have now, for more or less a full year, been using one of your Ultimate Blends shampoo products, specifically the one which has lemon in it. It was some lemon in shampoo that I was looking for, you see, and this product of yours that mixed it with a form of tea, the specifics of which escape me for the moment, was the only suitable product I have been able to find.

For no apparent or obvious reason I thought you might have an interest in my observations related, if not pertaining, to use of this product. If you have fears that this is a complaint, please allay those fears, for this product is mostly a success.

The shampoo – mostly – brings the accentuating features I so craved for my hair. After use every morning, the vibrant, vivacious and vivid volume I prefer is present throughout the day and for those moments of the evening when I am awake. In this sense, it is a triumph, and one I thank you for.

The next morning, however, is a very different story. There is no lasting effect, to put it rather bluntly. Granted, it could be the way in which I sleep that causes this, but every morning my hair has a lifeless, lacklustre slant to it – quite depressing, as I am sure you can imagine.

Whereas it is possible that a cause is that proper water is used when I wash my hair, rather than that treated and softened form of water that is in place for the rather more sensitive and delicate London market, I cannot but help wonder if it is the tea element which is causing this effect? Perhaps removing the tea from this particular blended shampoo would lead to an improvement in the sustainable, durable use of it.

I respect the fact that a key aspect of “blended” shampoo is that one item must be blended with another, for otherwise no blend would exist as such. Might I suggest that you blend lemon with more lemon to address this problem?

To explain, indeed clarify, my position, I have been an avid user of shampoo with lemon shoved in it since 1988, or possibly 1989. Yes, I am one of many who saw the versatile Jason Donovan discuss, on a children’s TV show, how he put lemon in all of the shampoo he used. I have, since that date, used shampoo with lemon in it almost exclusively, or at least as far as circumstance has allowed me.

Yes, in answer to the question that you have on this point. I am but one of the legion who used to use Timotei, the leaders in the field for putting lemon into shampoo. I am also one of those who was betrayed by Timotei when they, for no apparent reason but I have always suspected malice or spite against Jason Donovan, ceased to put lemon in their shampoo.  Their abject betrayal was of course disheartening at the time, but not fatally so – their decision to act in the way they did, after all, led me to towards your products which, bar the observations above, have proved to be both outstanding and noteworthy in respect of serving their purpose. 

Whilst I have no reason to doubt that you are already considering a new shampoo which features lemon blended with even more lemon, perhaps to be marketed as Ultra Blend for the sake of conformity, I thought it was all the same worth suggesting anyway, in case the idea had somehow escaped you.

In the mean time, if you could furnish me with any tips or advice on how I could attain a greater legacy from using the present form of your lemon containing shampoo, I would sincerely appreciate it. My immediate thought is to supplement my use of the shampoo with the similarly blended conditioner, but I am fearful of trying. I am not sure if I am ready to commit to using conditioner on either a regular or temporary basis.

how are you doing with this so far? i warned you it was quite long! there's a bit more to go, but to give you a little bit of a break, here's another of them video things that Richard keeps making and sending me. 

  

i trust that all of you Richard enthusiasts enjoyed that video, and that everyone else appreciated this brief interlude. great, now that is the end of the intermission, back to the letter. 

A lot of my fear around conditioner is that Jason Donovan did not, to my knowledge, mention anything at all about conditioner in general or with lemon in it specifically during the moment on television I mentioned. It is entirely possible that he could have, from what I recall the other guests on the show – I think it was comedy duo Trev and Simon but it is equally possible that it was the Chuckle Brothers – were particularly distracting.

Indeed, I suppose I could ask Jason Donovan directly about conditioner, but one does not like to trouble Australian actors and singers with questions pertaining to lemon unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

I look forward to, if you decide to indulge my correspondence, reading your thoughts and musings on the idea of shampoo that features lemon blended with even more lemon. I am also very excited indeed at the prospect of being guided by your wisdom in respect of how I could help avert, if not avoid, the flatness my hair seems to relish in on a morning, prior to using your product.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. More importantly, thank you for making available to me, and many others, a shampoo which contains lemon.

Yours faithfully, etc......

 

so yes, anyway, Garnier wrote back, as you can see in the above picture. one thing i would wish to be made absolutely clear is the superb quality of the paper that Garnier use to write letters on. it has that smooth, shiny gloss surface to it, and it is of a weight that says "we make that much money that we use nothing but the finest of papyrus to present correspondence on". which is good, well done them.

another image of the snow, you want? sure, why not.

yeah, i know, the quality off of the blueberry phone camera device is not that good, but hopefully the picture is not too offensive or distressing.

what is it that Garnier wrote back to me? well, you can have a look. for a start you should be warned - or be happy to know - that their response was not quite as long as the letter i sent to them. this is no bad thing, but a major source of disappointment to me is that they did not mention Jason Donovan at all in their letter.

it's not all bad; they have given me, or if you like assigned, my very own reference number!

basically above says yes, i should probably use conditioner too, and that they will give consideration to my class idea of blending lemon with more lemon in another shampoo. well, they didn't call it a class idea, but i think it is one so there. 

the above gives every sense of indication that they will investigate my idea and get back to me. i trust that they do not presume i would want any credit attributed to me for the brilliance of lemon blended with more lemon. i don't want fame, fortune or glory - i just want shampoo what has got lemon in it. 

so there you have it. as and when further replies come, i shall share as best i can. in the mean time, i am off to recuperate from my experiences today, by which i mean the expenditure and the exposure to the rather cold weather that i might have mentioned above. 

i trust that all is well with you at whatever point it is you read this. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!