'Twas the day before Christmas

Waking up to the sound of gentle rain one peered at the clock. It proudly claimed to be 4am. A tad early so one promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. Waking up again, this time to torrential rain and the sound of Crows squabbling, one peered once more at the clock. It still insisted that it was 4am.

Shit the fucking thing had stopped!

Scrambling out of bed one made coffee and hit the shower... with half an hour to get clean, drink coffee and shove on a uniform. Forget blessing whiskers... it was more in keeping with the sounds of the crows.

Unfortunately one made it... to spend another day in front of the perfume cabinet. Honestly all sense of smell is gone. It is the body's way of protecting itself. Though today brought out the other type of customer... the ones who only buy annually and haven't quite worked out that, in the age of aggressive amalgamation, their perfumes haven't make the cut... not to mention Christmas eve is too late to start the search.

Today one heard the litany of fragrances that were old when one was a teenager... and no there is nothing quite like them. There is a reason for that. See fragrances evoke memories... of when we were young and in love and the world was a kinder place. Actually it wasn't... but the lack of mass communication meant that we didn't hear about it every five minutes. They also hearken back to a time when we still could smell what we wore...

A bit of trivia for the readers... your sense of smell is linked to your oestrogen levels. It is why men can't smell their socks under the bed. It is also why women after a certain age pile the bloody stuff on like woollens in winter.

Now not realising that they can't actually smell perfume any longer they go with what they know. Unfortunately it comes from an age when they had a heavy musk base... which oddly enough can permeate almost any olfactory defence. Thankfully this generation has rejected most of them... though to be honest the fruity concoctions they seem to go for are not exactly an improvement.

So why was the Christmas Grinch manning the perfume you may be wondering... Well not only is one old enough to be able to remember the litany, but one is actually tactful enough to not tell people they are old enough to know better than to try and revisit their youth, let alone keep it alive.

How in fuck did that happen?

Oh that's right... old.