The Chemical Smell Trick.

I was thinking in the bath tonight that I’m not all that keen on women’s perfume any more. It smells of chemicals, probably because that’s what it is.

Somebody throws a bunch of chemicals into a test tube, adds water, pours it into a bottle, gives it a pretentious name, and then sticks a £30 price tag on it.

That’s stage 1. Stage 2:

Seek out some actress or other who is generally regarded – though rarely by me – as being attractive and whose agent charges £1,000 a second to pick up the phone, slap some skin coloured concoction on her face, deck her out in a costume which raises serious doubts about her level of self-respect, put her in front of a camera with a soft focus filter over the lens, have the director call ‘do pouting,’ and the job’s complete.

People will now queue up at the covered wagon in the shopping mall, desperate to throw quantities of £10 notes at the feet of Doc Crockett in the hope of acquiring a precious bottle of his elixir guaranteed to have every man within sniffing distance falling to his knees in helpless supplication.

Good trick. It probably even works, since most men are easily driven to a state of helpless supplication.

I do admit that I used to find the smell of musk a little more than merely pleasant, but it’s so long since I smelt it that I have no idea whether it would still have the same effect. I doubt it, somehow.

But, what the hell. It’s life and life only and my opinion on this matter is of no more consequence than it is on any other. For the record, I prefer women to smell of nothing but clean hair.

But I’m weird, and too old to matter. And the scotch tastes nice tonight. And Luke Kelly is singing Raglan Road. He’s dead, you know. Must work out a bass line for that song, then he and I can sing a duet at dead of night in Mill Lane some time in the future.