My job has been hard of late and so I have been doing serious aromatherapy - at the luxury end of the market.

I have found it quite fascinating how over the last ten years my sense of smell has become important to me. I mean I always knew that I was sensitive to fragrances and odours. I have always had to go to the bathroom and scrub if I’d used a fragrance that I didn’t like. I’d always known that if met someone in a bar in the days when bars were thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of years of spilled alcohol on a fermenting carpet, and the mingled colognes and fragrances of a hundred people, they’d always be someone who naturally smelled good to me - and not everyone does. I’d always known that I judged people on the basis of the fragrances they wore. I’d always known that the cheap end of the fragrance market - particularly supermarket underarm deodorants - were usually really offensive to me.

But over the last decade I’d developed my sense of smell. I paid attention to it. I began to try and describe what I scented. I slowly started to teach myself the mysteries of the world of odours whether it was real life or manufactured fragrances. I began to get very fetishistic about my visits to Smith & Caughey’s, which has Queen Street’s largest array of perfumes. I started knowing the staff there by first name. And perfumes presented a whole history for me to explore - it wasn’t just this year’s releases because there was a whole century of fragrances available. I could discover what 1912 smelled like with L’Heure Bleu. I could do 1947 and Christian Dior’s Miss Dior. Or I could fast-forward through Opium, Angel and L’Eau d’Issey to get a sense of the last decades of the Twentieth Century.

It has, I regret to say, become an addiction. Not the least because of the physical response I experience when sniffing a great fragrance. I am frequently off-my-face on perfumes. I have stumbled out from Smith & Caughey’s onto Queen Street just like an all-night party-goer leaves a venue in the dawn. Sometimes I am almost swooning on a great dense scent, incapable of speech. Sometimes I am sharpened by some of the recent maritime releases, my clear mind filled with clean ozone. Frequently I find myself sexually-aroused, particularly by some of the Guerlain and Caron range, and then I have often been caught surreptiously smelling myself just like a guilty four year old boy who has just discovered his own dick. I can spend a whole evening in a haze of sensuality. I will use a perfume before bed. I wake up in the morning and head for the shower with speed because after this I know I can select and apply a fragrance for the day. And in between I can somehow enjoy the spaces where I just smell of me, like a clean sheet.

I have also discovered that when stressed or overworked, a scent will revive and fascinate me. My home desk is now a small litter of perfume bottles and samples. I am now packing fragrances for my work day too so, after travelling the length of my first morning’s application through its dry-down, I can then reapply it and do it all again. I keep a bottle within range so that I can go for a sniff of the cap after a difficult meeting or a long work call, just to get an undiluted blast of the top notes again.

I’m not sure what my workmates think of this fixation. The one thing you are never aware of is the sillage or wake of your fragrances - just how they fill a room. You can ask in the spirit of research but you seldom do. I’ve been doing some fairly rich products of the 1920s of late and I do wonder how everyone else experiences them around me. It’s not that I douse myself. I usually err on the side of caution - I don’t really need much to get off anyway. But sometimes I do have visions of myself, at the corner desk, emanating complex odours like a Ralph Steadman illustration for a Hunter S. Thompson novel.

But more than anything, in my task-orientated day, these scents somehow get me through. They revive my flagging spirit. They may send me momentarily into some sort of anyl-nitrate thing where for thirty seconds I am useless for anything else, but ultimately they sustain me. I am buoyed aloft upon them. They give me a temporal unfolding to follow through hours as I chart a fragrance’s rise and fall. They make my day bearable and they make it rich.

Smell is our most unexplored sense yet more of our brain is devoted to dealing with it than our sense of sight. We have virtually no vocabulary to describe it. Children are not taught its physics or culture in schools. We are not aware of the great physical reactions that can accompany a scent. We are seldom aware of the way it can influence our lives whether the choice of a partner or the selection of a home. It is a wonderful New World that we are somehow free to construct.

So pass me that original 1944 formulation of Robert Piguet’s Bandit or that 1906 Jacques Guerlain Apres L’Ondee or that Serge Luten’s 21st Century Iris Silver Mist soI can begin to link them up in starry points to form constellations as I construct a fragrance history of our times. Let me dress with Comme De Garcon’s Patchouli Luxe or Bulgari Black to be companions to take me through my nights. And pass me that Chanel 31 Rue Cambon or that Caron En Avion so that I can care for my soul.