An intense odour filled the bedroom

in the early hours this morning - the sort of scent I associate with perfumed fabric conditioners. I lay still, concentrating and  trying to work out where this smell was coming from. I did an imaginative olfactory tour of the smelly items in the bathroom that might have exploded but none of our soaps, shampoos or shaving foams smell like this.

Something was preventing me from getting out of bed to have a look but I finally decided that the smell was coming from outside the house, the only rational explanation being that youths no longer disturb the peace by shouting and spraying grafitti, these boys have grown wings and are going round puffing perfume through people's windows.

Yucky and Owchy

While in Hungary I loved going to the bath houses. During one visit I saw a translation of the hundreds of available treatments. I copied part of the list in case I was talking to someone and they suggested we went for galvanaram kezeles.


The Indian Film-maker told me that every day she practises 'oil-pulling'.


She fills her mouth with oil and swills it around for TWENTY MINUTES before spitting it out. This is an ayurvedic treatment to rid the body of toxins and is considered excellent for oral health, the skin and lots of other things.

The Indian Film-maker saw my face as she was telling me this

Oh you will definitely vomit the first time you try it, maybe also the second and third time but I promise with practise you can do it.

This made me think of a friend who washes herself regularly in her own urine  and a family member who has her face acid-peeled.

Sometimes I pay to let a heavy woman lean on me and rub pieces of thread around my mouth to eradicate my moustache and goatee beard.

Ant Hoovering

Today I finally hoovered the ants.

During any given summer many ants launch themselves on doomed nuptial flights wherever it is that I am staying. It seems futile to try and do anything about it until the stream of bodies stops but I’ve been here for two weeks now and still they are pouring out from under my window frame, heading straight for any electrical items and then dying. Drifts of little black bodies had piled up too high to ignore any longer.

After hoovering I rediscovered the product that I bought last week in the Azores. I haven’t dared use it yet, I think it is moisturising cream but then again my translating powers might not be all they should be.


I prefer my body lotion not to smell. A few years ago I endured a harrowing journey to London when I boarded a train after rubbing my knees with cocoa butter. The train was packed and I took a seat behind a family with a little dog, the child started on immediately and loudly that there was 'Someone eating chocolate’ and the dog spent the entire journey scrabbling at me through the seats.

Despite the train-and-cocoa-butter experience, I ended up buying this product mainly because I was intrigued by the words on the bottle. 'Love Lotion’ promises 'sexy and attractive skin’ which is what one might hope for in a moisturiser but it also explicitly claims in words written around a pair of kissy lips that it 'seduces 9 out of every 10 men’ on the back of the bottle this claim is reinforced with the words 'in tests 9 out of every 10 men ...

I need more information about this testing: at what distances does Love Lotion work? Does it work on any particular sort of man?

The claim states that 90 per cent of men are seduced by Love Lotion but was it applied to women or, like cigarettes and other cosmetics, was the testing done on beagles and mice?

If anybody reading this is a tester for Love Lotion will you please supply answers to my questions.