Perfume: the sweet smell of… delusion

It can make you an irresistible object of desire, a cute, flirty tease or a macho man about town.  It can add adventure to your boring life and make you the sexiest thing on two legs. It can bring you true love with a gorgeous partner, make you brave and elegant and…

Yes, the Christmas Perfume Push is reaching its feverish climax once again.

If we believe all the TV adverts, we’d think that just pulling out our credit cards and buying their mass-produced product will make us stand out from the crowd as an amazing, stylish individual. Oh, really. What – all of us?

Absolutely. You might be an overweight, ugly, tedious bore from Basildon whose most exciting achievement this year was getting your company’s tax return in on time, but one squirt of that stuff and you’ll be partying with the beautiful people.

Who do they think they’re kidding? Oh, yes – us.

They mash up some flowers with exotic names, mix it with ethanol and a few other glamorous ingredients like odorous sacs from a beaver or petrified rock hyrax excrement and give it an enticing brand name.

Then they lob about 6 teaspoonsful of this crap into a pretty bottle and charge us £40 for it – enough to give ten children back their sight.

Are we really the mugs they think we are? Let’s have some sense instead of scents this year!

Save these innocent victims: DON’T sign a petition

canstockphoto27274911We learn so much on the internet.

And, every so often, we’ll read a horrifying account of cruelty or unfairness which makes our blood boil. It’s accompanied by a petition to help put things right, and we sign up gladly.

So, what happens after we sign the petition?

Within hours – or seconds – we’ll be deluged with requests to sign other petitions. For topics completely unrelated to the cause we chose to support. For problems we didn’t know existed, political issues we never felt strongly about and things we didn’t previously want to save or prevent.

After all, we’re warm-hearted, caring people – we must have an opinion about dolphin-smuggling in the rainforest, homeless elephants with breast cancer, or transgender supertankers in prison.

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Yes, I know I’m driving you crazy – and I just don’t care

canstockphoto4701270To the guy in the car behind me:

Yes, I’m that @#&! idiot who’s hogging the middle lane and making you late for work.

And you know what? I couldn’t give a damn.

The left-hand lane is full of lorries who are restricted to 60 mph, and as they slow down to 40 every time we reach a hill, I’m not getting stuck behind them. If the road clears, I’ll pull in and let you pass, but until then you’ll just have to wait.

The right-hand lane is packed with maniacs zipping along at 90 miles an hour. If you want to overtake me, try pulling out in front of one of them. Please. You deserve each other.

Believe me, I know you want to get past. Yes, I did actually manage to figure that out when you flashed your headlights and tried to frighten me by driving close to my back bumper. Bad luck – I stopped being impressed by temper tantrums when I had kids!

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Time to dump this tired idea: why the Poop Scene has to go

toiletroll-300x152I don’t like to mention it, but… frankly, I’m the only one, these days.

Talking about such matters used to be unthinkable – the epitome of Things That Were Just Not Done in polite society. Every family had their own private word for it to avoid flushes of embarrassment when our tiny tots let it slip out in front of visitors. Even the room where it happened frequently had a euphemistic name: the little girls’ room, the smallest room, etc.

But since the 1970s, humour seems to have gone down the pan. The floodgates opened and the brown tide oozed in. The unmentionable has become the almost-unavoidable.

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Breaking news: nothing happened today

canstockphoto3810847Here is the news…

Nothing much happened today, so we’re going to witter on for hours about the stuff we told you yesterday. And the day before. And in the last two news bulletins. And in the headlines a few seconds ago.

Yes, even though there have been no new developments. And we’ve already told you two hours ago that we won’t know any more about it until tomorrow.

Here with us in the studio is someone who isn’t particularly famous, attractive or interesting and who has no more expert knowledge about it than you do. So, what can you tell us about the situation?

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