I’ve always been keen on perfume. My only other paid job, ever, apart from writing, was as a scent salesgirl at a pharmacy in King’s Cross station when I was a teenage runaway. These days I love the beautiful, singular perfumes of Ormonde Jayne, especially Damask, a stroppy gourmand rose.
“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!”
But then, a fortnight after I acquired a pair of kittens (from Stoke Newington, who socialistically preferred the claustrophobia of the cat-litter box to my lovely garden, complete with an orchard and a swimming pool), came the sad day when he stood there and sniffed not with relish but with something approaching revulsion.
“Cats?” he enquired sympathetically.
I nodded glumly. My days of having the best-smelling house in Hove were over, obvs.
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.
“Do you have carpets at home, or wooden floors?” a nurse asked me ominously in the rehab hospital. When I answered that it was the first, she shook her head. “Be careful. Don’t get urine on the carpet. I loved my nan… but I always tried to get out of going round her house. The smell!”
It’s easier said than done, though. A bout with constipation recently led my catheter to “bypass” and I was swamped in urine.
“I can’t smell anything!” said Mr Raven gamely when he came in. But I wasn’t convinced. Poor sod, he’s been rendered thoroughly nose-blind by the olfactory state of his wife.
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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If I did smell, would it be the end of the world? So much has been lost since December – my ability to walk comes to mind – that whether or not I’m fresh as a daisy seems a minor carp. I must admit to missing what I think of as my Wash ‘n’ Go days – that thing young people have where they can just roll out of bed and look ready for a catwalk. But come to think of it, I do recall staying up for three nights in a row doing all manner of dirty deeds when I was young and not being over-concerned with my personal hygiene, so maybe I whiffed – intermittently – all along.
“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.
“Why does my gran look so grubby?” the arrogant young me used to think somewhat irritably of my adored grandmother. The answer is because the wear and tear the decades inflict and the natural effects of ageing combine to leave us at the mercy of our bodies. Some of us will sail through; some of us will struggle.
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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