Britain right now smells like sex. As you stand outside the post office, looking through your bag for a mask, you are bathed in the smell of fornication. As you take your aunt Elsie for a quick stroll to the hairdressers, the air drips with coitus. While lining up outside nursery to pick up your child, your nose is full of the smell of bonking. The sweet, vaguely piscine, sometimes acrid smell of shagging is hanging heavy everywhere – and we seem determined to ignore it.
At least, most of us. While poems are written about the nodding heads of daffodils, and Instagram stories are awash with swaying oceans of bluebells, most people seem rather less inclined to admit that – to paraphrase that famous Mitchell and Webb sketch – every park in England smells like semen. That walking your dog is, for a few weeks in May, the nasal equivalent of squelching through a bordello. It is quite an impressive act of dissociation to be standing beside, say, a hawthorn bush at the No 3 bus stop, as a sexually active adult, and not immediately turn to the person beside you to say, “Wow, this pavement really smells like fucking!” And yet we do. You might notice the odd quivering nostril, catch a conspiratorial smile, but you’re unlikely to meet a stranger who acknowledges that the air beyond their chin smells like nookie.
