Germ Free Adolescent

 

Those of a particular vintage will remember this belter from UK punks, X-ray SpeX, and here (Germ Free Adolescent)is a link to them performing it, and that is them at the top of the page.

The theme of the song is that some of us want to clean ourselves into oblivion so that we can be the germ-free adolescent of the title. Here are some of the lyrics:

She's a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way

The fact that we have a smell, and a distinctive one at that, is not something that causes any problems at all to our dogs. They love the fact that they can tell when a new person has come into the room, and when it is someone they love, it is absolutely the best thing ever! (dogs do seem to be full of enthusiasm, whatever the situation). The idea that you would do anything to hide or remove our individual scent would make as much sense to a dog as us trying to remove our face so that we couldn't be recognised. But somehow the very smell of a human seems to be unacceptable to many of us. 

OK, I understand that if you are stuck next to a sweaty person on a crowded train then the glory of our aroma starts to pale very quickly, but I think we are very wrong to try to become aromatically-neuter. And that neutering can  be done just as effectively by spraying our perfume or body-mist or after-shave all over us as by trying to wash ourselves into non-existence. 

When I used to teach children in primary school, I noticed that their senses of smell (unpolluted as yet by tobacco, alcohol and coffee) were very acute and unselfconscious. If someone left an (identical) school sweatshirt on a chair and I said "whose is that?" to the last children leaving the room, then as like as not, one of them would come over and sniff it and say "It's Kevin's" (or whoever). They could still, and certainly until the age of 8 or 9, recognise each other's distinctive aroma and not think that this skill was odd. I'm sure that sometimes the fabric conditioner may have given an additional hint, but essentially they could identify their friends by smell and had not been made to think this was odd. 

Now when we go through puberty we do of course (both sexes) get smellier, and perhaps get less good at smelling. It was certainly around puberty that family started to think that a present of 'Old Spice' or 'Aramis' after shave was a good idea, even if you hadn't started shaving yet. But at that same puberty I think parts of our sense of smell start to be able to pick up other pheromones which will become very important as the years go by. And there are some messages which we adults would hate to have blurred by masking perfumes. 

And I think all of us would admit that there are people whose very presence seems to calm us or excite us (when they are close to us), and could not some of that feeling come from the very fact that we recognise their smell just as much as we recognise the sound of their voice? Now that person could be our mother when we are too young to know the meaning of words but we can know the meaning of smells; or it could be a friend who always seems to calm us down and somehow hypnotise us into equanimity even when they don't say anything; or it could be that the smell of our partner, our loved one, is always mixed together with the feelings of closeness that we have shared. How many of our sense of someone's 'presence' or 'character' is at least partly what they smell like?

So cleanliness may be next to Godliness, but maybe a little bit of our animal odour is much closer to humanity.