Personal HygieneThere comes a point at which your hygiene becomes less your problem and more everyone else's:
My old school nurse never seemed to wash - instead she wrapped herself in crepe bandages from the first aid kits. The smell was beyond pungent. If you got ill at school, it was better to suffer than try and explain symptoms whilst only breathing out.
When she was eventually 'let go',they had to strip the wallpaper in her office to get rid of the lingering odour.
How scuzzy have you got? Or, failing that, how bad have people you know got?
(
chthonic, Thu 22 Mar 2007, 12:40)
« Go Back
Lavender... oh god, lavenderMy mum worked for the old Westminster Hospital, and used to get me a file-monkey job in the school holidays. And down in the basement, among the patient notes, dwelt Morlock Woman.
She reeked. But not of relatively normal body fluids, no. The closest I can describe it is lavender talcum powder, but concentrated to Zyklon-B levels. I'm really really not kidding; this was the worst smell I have still ever smelt off any human being and I'm a Tube commuter and used to tramps marinating in months-old piss, businessmen who've obviously worn the same suit all heatwave without benefit of deodorant and the guy I'm convinced was possessed by a demon because nothing human could simultaneously smell of rot and honey. You have to imagine her odour as a solid aura of granny-from-hell that coated your breathing passages in stinking chalkiness from the end of the corridor. She must have had geological layers of the stuff on. It permeated her. And it permeated you, if you were anywhere near her or where she'd been. Normal human stenches were a bouquet after smelling Helen.
(, Thu 22 Mar 2007, 21:40, Reply)
« Go Back