“You smell gorgeous!” is one of the best things, after being called a good writer, that anyone can say to me. In the 1990s I lived in a big house which I filled with Diptyque candles; one of my favourite cabbies, standing on the doorstep, would always inhale deeply and say, “Julie, you’ve got the best-smelling gaff ever!”
“Cats?” he enquired sympathetically.
Thirty years on, that’s quite how I feel about myself since my bit of trouble. (I suffered from a spinal abscess last year and can no longer walk.) I’m convinced that I smell somewhat like a copiously-used cat-litter box. My husband and my friends assure me that it’s not true. But such is my constant preoccupation with catheters, constipation and adult nappies – all the frills and furbelows that often accompany wheelchair life – that I can’t shake the feeling that I must whiff of something awful. Like my sainted gran’s knicker drawer, in fact.
It’s easier said than done, though. A bout with constipation recently led my catheter to “bypass” and I was swamped in urine.
Maybe a tiny bit of me takes pleasure in the look of shock which flashes across my friends’ faces as I trill “Lipstick, keys… nappy!” when I check my bag while preparing to go out, but it’s best to treat things lightly sometimes or risk becoming a bore. I’m aware that a level of fastidiousness is inevitably lost, if one is to have some other life than constantly fussing with oneself. Now I’m the proud possessor of a stage three pressure sore, I’ve got another potentially unpleasant source of odour to think about.
square JULIE BURCHILL I'm now disabled - it's made me more determined to work than ever
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“You smell” is both a childish slight and a deep wound which speaks to the very adult fear of the day approaching when we will lose some measure of autonomy. (Though the publisher Jefferson Hack is reported to have chatted up Kate Moss with the pungent come-on: “You smell of pee.” “Kate is used to men being in totally awe of her,” a source told the Mirror with admirable irony. “So Jefferson was like a breath of fresh air.”) It speaks to our most basic fears of not being able to present a decent game-face to the world.
At the end of the day, the fact that I may whiff a bit doesn’t matter at all compared to the fact that I can’t walk. But the possibility that I may have a slight redolence of a cat-litter box nevertheless causes me more concern than it should. Never mind – pass the Damask and spritz it all over.
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