deodorant

Brace yourself….more intimate revelations.

I have been using the same deodorant since I was 14. So a little over 30 years. When I began using it it was the mid 80s and so Roll On was the order of the day. We were still in the height of the CFC crisis terrified of eroding any more of the ozone layer by spraying or changing our fridge. It seemed that overnight we all switched to roll on. And the crisis was averted… Ah the innocence.

Anyway. Once the aerosol companies caught on and eliminated those nasty CFCs I switched back to a spray. To avoid the need for arm flapping every morning. And have used it ever since.

And then last year I was unable to buy it from Sainsburys on line. I was down to my last can and getting slightly panicky so I went to Boots. They didn’t have it either. Neither did Superdrug.

And it slowly dawned on me that Sure had stopped making my ‘flavour’ in a spray. I scoured on line pharmacies and managed to find one with some stock and bought 10 cans. This has now run out.

And so I am faced with finding a new smell. And I resent it.

On this holiday I brought with me a new brand of spray. Eldest doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like how I smell. I don’t like it either. I don’t smell like ‘me’.

It is made all the worse because smell is such an evocative sense. Certain aromas can transport me back to a time and place in an instant.

Rain on hot pavements for instance. That aroma which usually only happens a few times a year in my neck of the woods takes me back to my child hood. Instantly.

My paternal grandma lived in a house with a lovely big garden. It wasn’t probably that big but to me it seemed enormous. Towards the back she had a row of large conifers which formed a sort of hedge behind which my brother and I used to hide and make dens. The smell of laylandii confiers takes me right back to those days, sitting on a rug out of sight of parents picking those little seed pod things off the trees.

Similarly on the wall around the side of our house when we lived in Formby in the north west we had an outlet, a silver box thing about a foot square set at about child’s head height, probably for the central heating which let off a sort of gas smell, not unpleasant but very distinctive. Another very evocative perfume whenever a catch a whiff of it nowadays.

There are countless others, my old school dinner hall, the insides of tents, line dried washing, freshly mown grass, the smell of Christmas which is actually the smell of my loft at my old house…

So I understand my eldest’s frustration with my deodorant issue. He has spent his entire life smelling me a particular way and part of that aroma is Sure Cool Blue spray deodorant, it is part of me. And now I don’t have it anymore.

There is still a roll on version. Which won’t be quite the same but may have to do.

Grrr…..I hate arm flapping…