Smell like you mean it

I was just out strolling the mean streets of my blandly suburban Oxfordshire town admiring how the return to school has brought an impressive deluge of traffic back to the roads when I passed a group of boys on their own way to school.

They reached about waist height on me, rustling in their fresh blazers, all four of them with the same haircut of curls piled on top and brushed forward that looks like a bad 1950s toupee but must be popular on someone or other at the moment. It’s all very different to my day, but then I did start secondary school over 30 years ago. We had none of the bravado or swagger these boys were taking up the whole pavement with.

But when they passed, that was a whole different story. I found myself choking on the familiar scent of mass market body spray. It’s nice to smell that Lynx is a universal rite of passage (Axe if you’re from somewhere less enlightened), though I do wonder how many pollinators are being thoughtlessly slaughtered every year by these roaming clouds of fertiliser. I could see flies dropping in their wake as they swanked their way to an opening salvo of English, French and Feelings (curriculum’s very different these days).

I staggered home and immediately began writing a blog post about it, but at least I have survived to tell the tale.