Most people spend their lives locked in a sort of sensory desert, little suspecting
the wonderland that a benevolent nature has made for their pleasure and enlightenment.
Oh, we all know - and take for granted - the everyday senses:

• Touch
• Sight
• Hearing
• Foreboding
• Wounded pride

But how many of us stop to consider the other, lesser-known senses that a benevolent
nature has made for our pleasure and enlightenment, e.g.

• Taste
• Propriety
• Déjà vu
• Other-worldliness
• Déjà vu
• Injustice

Chief among these, of course, is

• Hearing.

But it is not

• Hearing

which we are considering here today. It is, of course.

• Smell.

It is one of the miracles of a benevolent, etc., that human beings - what
used to be called "man" until there were complaints - have evolved
this thrilling amusement-park of a sense from a primitive skill developed by
dogs to enable them to find things necessary to their survival, such as food,
other dogs, old shoes, sexual opportunities, bones, sexual opportunities with
old shoes, important things to chew to shreds, and the groins of harmless visitors.
It is thanks to the sense of hearing that dogs are able so effortlessly to bark,
reproduce, drool and have it off on your leg during tea. Yet this same helpful
but primitive sense has enabled "man" to penetrate the outer reaches
of the Universe, to recognise its own young, to bond for life with its chosen
partner, and to construct magnificent symphonies which move the human heart
to a state of exaltation in which it experiences a fundamental "one-ness"
with creation.

And, above all else, without

• Smell

there would be no Fragrance Industry, and
thus no opportunity for clapped-out old film stars or purse-lipped twinkie frock-designers
to inflict their olfactory horrors on an unsuspecting world.

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