Smelling the Flowers

For an ex-smoker, I have a ridiculously sensitive sense of smell. I accept this, I have always been the same and while age has taken its toll on my taste buds, eyesight and hearing, for some reason the gods have decided to leave me this sense as a gift. I can understand the reasons behind these senses failing:

• Your eyesight starts to fade so that you can't see your looks going,
• Your hearing starts to go so that you can't hear people saying your looks are going,
• Your taste buds start to go so that makers of extremely strong cheese have people to buy their product,
• Your sense of smell goes, of course, so that as you fall into increasing decrepitude, you don't notice that faint aroma-de-wee that seems to come to us all.

(You can see the direction this blog is taking I hope.. express train to Rantsville approaching, all aboard!)

I have, over the years, become used to the fact that I smell things other people seem to miss. I can smell if rain is approaching, long before it does. I seem to be wired so that I can smell days. Saturday always has a distinctive smell (honestly it does!). I can even smell if someone has cut themselves. There is one smell however, that I will never get used to and it seems more and more common. It varies in strength, but always induces a flight reaction in me. I do anything to get away from it, even to the point of being rude.

Body Odour

Even the words have a smell! Why are we so reluctant to tell someone they smell? It can be seen as offensive to mention it, however I find it offensive to be around someone who smells. When you're in a food store and every section you walk down seems have the lingering odour of unwashed body, because let's face it, that is what it is, then it makes shopping, which is a generally unpleasant but necessary experience into a downright nightmare for me.

Am I being intolerant? Hell yes I am! Men - women do not find it attractive! I don't care if you've been grafting hard all day and your muscles are bulging. If you'd washed and put deodorant on in the morning then you wouldn't smell. The Diet Coke man, out on his building site, or fixing his lifts DOES NOT SMELL!

I'm not putting all this on to men either, although they are by far the worst culprits. Women, you know who you are..(gods I hope you do) a little anti-perspirant goes a long way after a nice wash! Please.. think of the example you are setting your children. If you don't have any children of course, are you at all surprised??

It's not only old people either so don't blame it all on them (I'm not mentally ready to put "us" there yet).

So please, have a thought for those that still retain their sense of smell, if only for the sake of your dignity. Don't make people recoil from you when they move near. It must make you feel awful - don't do it to yourselves!