People who Smell

One of the worst things about summer – with the obvious exception of hayfever – is that hot weather makes people sweaty.

And a proportion of those people who are sweaty (many of whom can, in fairness, be identified on sight) really start to smell bad.

Now, many of these people will actually be smelly all year round. But in the same way that if you make a bottle of horrible wine cold enough, you can’t taste how bad it is – the usual cold weather has the merciful effect of keeping their stench down to a level where only intimate contact would uncover it.

I realise that at a time when the global economy is in a coma and many parts of the world are exploding in protest, complaining about the body odour of others probably marks me out as a rather trivial person.

Well to that all I can say is, if you want to carry on gathering in the streets and getting battered by the police, be my guest. After all, hundreds of years of experience of it having absolutely no effect whatsoever on power notwithstanding, this might just be the time that waving a placard and being hit on the head achieves something momentous.

Water canon: not always a bad thing

I have nothing to say about these global protestors at the moment unless they smell. Which some of them probably do, while others don’t.

This is not a complaint about homeless people – who have an excuse. 

Water is widely available here in the UK. Soap, deodorant and other means of preventing your carcass from giving other people migraines are inexpensive. Using them is a matter of basic human politeness, the same as not cuffing passers-by around the back of the head.

Can you not tell that you smell like a bin bag full of decomposing vegetables on a hot summer’s afternoon? Do you like it?

If ever I get onto a train with broken air conditioning, I can be assured that the hulking, wall-eyed, polyester-clad, adult virgin staggering down the aisle is going to sit next to me. And he’s going to smell like he’s been wearing the same clothes for a year and has a leaky catheter about his person. And it’s going to get hotter and hotter.

The Bhagavad-gītā tells us “we are not these bodies”.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know we are responsible for these bodies.