In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve failed to achieve, and accepting there’s only a finite number of years left to you. It was clearly a time for making a change of some sort, something fundamental and radical, and I duly made one. I faced reality, took myself in hand, and decided to switch to a new aftershave.
Until then, it had been Dunhill Edition all the way. Launched in 1984, it had caught me in my mid-teens, was my first taste of adult sophistication (Jeremy Irons wore it!) and it hadn’t really occurred to me in the intervening decades to wear anything else. Indeed, for a man to pay too much attention to such things seemed – and still does – slightly infra dig.
There is of course a rabbit hole neatly prepared for people with such interests
Yet in the year of my half century I became obsessed – and I mean obsessed – with finding a good replacement, and soon I was haunting the perfume-halls of large stores and spraying so many liquids onto so many strips of card it was getting embarrassing. Perhaps it was a case of mid-life madness but I took heart from some dying words from my uncle, delivered to his son. Too many people, he said, who indulged all the other four senses willy-nilly – neglected their sense of smell. Life was full of wonderful smells, there for the enjoying, and we forgot this at our peril.
This resonated with me. My own life, as I looked back, seemed to have been a succession of smells with the power to depress or delight. At prep-school, floor polish mixed with disinfectant (a combination that can........