Last night we pitched up at the pub at around 10pm, expecting a medium-sized throng; all we discovered was a fairly inebriated with a bottle of Semillon Chardonnay and 4 empty glasses. Neil made up for lost time and got talking about smell. He revealed that he was wearing “Truth” by Calvin Klein, which gave all his pronouncements on Kant, Stockhausen and the Meaning Of Art an invincible quality. “Feel the smell of truth,” said Jenny. As he became increasingly caught up in the discussion, he began to look a little like this:

I leant back in my chair, sipping a glass of “wine”, looking a bit like this:

As I get older, it's becoming more important to me that I “smell nice”. My body battles hard against the products I innoculate it with in the morning, but they just about hold out until the end of the day. I received some Green Irish Tweed (made by Creed) (not to be confused with Tweed, by Lentheric) (which is for ladies) for Christmas two years ago, and shortly afterwards people started saying that I “smell nice”. This has never happened to me before, especially not in my late teens and early 20s, when bathing was a major inconvenience and 3 week tours of sweaty rock venues in Europe would be undertaken with perhaps 2 changes of clothes and some Lynx deodorant (something like “Voodoo” or even “Dimension”.) How I imagined that any lithe, supple Swiss groupies would be even vaguely interested in my sweaty, stinking form is, frankly, incredible in retropect. At the time I just thought they must be a bit confused. “They just don't know me well enough,” I would have said. In fact, they knew me plenty well enough. Phew.

Anyway, I enjoy “smelling nice”, so “smelling nice” is now a priority. Neil said that always “smells nice”; I've not got near enough to notice – sniffing around people is generally bad form when you don't know them very well – but I'd be keen on hearing about people who “smell nice”. Who “smells nice”? Especially those who “smell nice” naturally, who exude waves of pheremones that have people swooning in shop doorways. We should scrape their bodies, bottle the stuff, keep some back for ourselves, and flog the remainder at car boot sales. I'm happy to pin these people down if someone else can wield the spatula.