On pretentiousness, bendy willies, and chocolate milk

I'm not making this up. Ridiculousness in a bottle.

I am fresh from the shower. So fresh, in fact, that apparently I smell of "oriental lotus flower and orange blossom". Now I don't know about you, lovely readers, but I find myself lost somewhere between perplexity and hilarity upon finding such an exotic aroma during part of a fairly mundane ritual. It's hardly the introspective, enlightening act of my day; I mean, I'm furiously scrubbing my sweaty armpits and performing a ten-toe-inspection for running-related callouses and wobbly nail beds. Sometimes I lose my balance and shriek as one of my buttocks hits the cold wall with a slap. I do not embody the graceful elegance and feminity of a Grecian water-nymph. However, I did highly enjoy the juxtaposition between the heavenly scents (including hair conditioner "with shimmery pearl and rose extracts"!) of yesterday's bathe and the post-run mud and grit that turned the shower tray a rich shit-brown as it cascaded down my caked legs.

Well, I have questions. Where did these ludicrous flavours come from? Is there perhaps such a job title as Executive Toiletry Bullshitter? (If there is, I want it.) When did we become too good for simple, soapy soap? Isn't crushed pearl otherwise known as calcium carbonate, in which case shouldn't we be feeding them to our grandmothers to combat their osteoporosis? Am I simply too philistinistic to enjoy the subtleties of the finer things in life? Are these sensual descriptions yet another way in which, as a society, we are constantly exposed to unnecessary and overt sexualisation of everything that surrounds us? I don't want sex in the shower. See my concerns above re: cold buttocks. What IS a lotus flower, and where does it come from? (Answer: it's an Asian aquatic flower with a delicate open spread of pinky-white petals, and clearly far too beautiful to be mashed into a shower gel).

And where does this end? I haven't come across many lotus flowers, but if I did, I know for sure I wouldn't be callously wiping them over my nether regions. Shimmery pearls have already fallen prey to the whims of our increasingly demanding personal care: what if the next parfum du jour is the precious and rare orchid? There are orchids that look like little monkey faces - hell, there are orchids that look like tiny, behatted men with bendy willies! FOR GOD'S SAKE LEAVE THE WILLY MEN ALONE!

STEP AWAY FROM THE WILLY MEN

When I was growing up - an unfinished process spanning the last 28 years, for your information - I remember soap being pretty much soap-flavoured. Sweets were either strawberry, bubblegum, or Irn-Bru. Toothpaste was, when I was very young, milk-flavoured. Everything could be remedied either by plasters (if it bled and needed to stay put), or by Swarfega (if it was creosote-based and needed to come off). If one was very old, say, granny-aged, one was then allowed to indulge in rose- or lavender-scented hand lotion, but this only came with the passage of time and wrinkles. The closest I came to exoticism at bath-time was in my later years when I started using banana-flavoured shampoo from the Body Shop, and I had no doubt as to its utter lack of make-believe: I could see the fruit fibres floating around in it. I tried to eat it once. Only once. I was aware of scented finery, of course: grown-up, classy women like my mother wore Chanel No. 5 on important occasions; they still do. But this is not pretentiousness. This is timeless style.

I encounter the same sensual silliness with food. They're not just salt and vinegar crisps - oh no. They're hand-baked crispy potato crisps with freshly-harvested sea-salt and fragrant Italian Balsamic vinegar. They're not just chocolate cookies - no, no no. They're triple-chocolate cookie crunch with extra chocolately chunks, hand-whipped farm-fresh cream and toasted free-range walnuts, specially designed for you by our Swiss chocolatiers. Great. But crisps and chocolate biscuits in my days of yore tasted pretty great even when they weren't hand-massaged and serenaded.

And let me further address that afore-mentioned "farm-fresh" description. I love farms; I love everything about them. I love the smell of the machinery, their leaking oil and diesel fumes; the dusty strawbale castles with their precariously covered dungeons and wavering towers; the nervous chickens and their haplessly unguarded eggs. And above all I love the cows: their warm loving breath, their gently waving ears and slowly blinking eyes, their steaming excrement. It's fresh, alright. Having spent a lot of time on farms, and having tasted more than my fair share of good food, I don't agree that dairy produce must be described as "farm-fresh" for it to be perceived as good quality produce. If you smell milk as fresh as it comes, straight from the udder and still hotly steaming into the stainless steel vat, yes, of course it's delicious. It makes the best cow-powered hot chocolate you'll ever taste. But the cows are right there next to the vat. Your nostrils are overwhelmed by an irreplaceable smell of fresh poo and hot milk. Like a baby, I suppose, only more pleasant. I wouldn't change it for the world. But personally I like my chocolate cookies not to be reminiscent of shit.

Can't we just be content with soap that happily lathers?