Surreptitious Sniffing

Tuesday 18 December 2012 – I am about to own up to doing something today that I have never done before. It’s an odd furtive thing and I urge you not to judge me too harshly. Today I was out shopping. It was a usual shopping trip that consisted of queuing for parking spaces, queuing at tills and queuing at ATM machines. It was whilst I was queuing at a till; my goods moving slowly down the conveyor belt towards the bored looking boy at the end, who’s name badge told me he was called Jamie, that I committed myself to this bizarre act of absurdity.

Just before my goods reached Jamie, a woman in a purple sweater passed me, there was nothing peculiar about the woman that made her stand out visually, but she smelled lovely – obviously a very expensive perfume had been liberally applied. I was captivated by the scent that wafted across my nostrils as she passed by, so I grabbed my items off the conveyor, which made Jamie look up disdainfully and followed the woman down the aisle. Every time she stopped, so did I, just hanging back enough not to look like a weirdo stalker. I was surreptitiously sniffing this exquisite scent as she carried on shopping, non-the-wiser.

As we turned a corner it suddenly struck me that what I was doing was odd and as I broke away and made my way back to the till and Jamie, my OH asked me what I’d been doing. The look of horror on his face said it all and Jamie looked up as a bloke with curly hair called another one with sticky-up hair a blood weird freak.

On the plus-side, when I got home the postman had delivered my new bottle of man spray: Narciso Rodriguez, so if you want to follow me and sniff at it please form an orderly queue.

 

Now for something more serious – later this evening, it was dark outside and the streets were deserted when a feeble knock came on my front-door. I opened the door and looked down at two very small, very young girls who held out an open sweet tin that contained coins. Two pairs of eyes gazed up at me, two mouths parted and they began to sing We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, etc. I gave my stock response – “Bugger off.” and closed the door. Then I thought, bloody hell anything could happen to the little mites, how irresponsible to allow two small children at this time of night to go knocking on strangers’ doors.

I mean anything could happen – they could run into a supermarket sniffing stalker or worse.