It lingers up your nostrils like a prolonged after taste of a table spoon of cod liver oil – not crazy bad but not lovely good either. It’s not rotten egg or as pungent as ammonia but something that lurks in between the after smell of a chemistry experiment gone wrong and a kind of non-violent stink bomb, something that never made it to The Body Shop counter: Odius by Le Skunke.

Maybe there’s a mad chef out there using it to fry shiitake mushrooms and swears it’s the best thing since sliced spam? I don’t want to use the hackneyed phrase ‘dried sick’ but it’s definitely got a smell that mingles with your natural oils which turns the base-notes rather shitty. It’s hard to describe and this is exactly what I’m trying to do because I have never smelt a smell like it.

Although I did work with a guy, who when he took his socks off in the canteen and dropped them onto the floor they smashed!”

But that can be xplained with a simple ‘disgusting’ or ‘revolting’ or ‘mingin’ or my personal favourite “that my friend, is one decimal away from howlin”. This smell of almost rancid oily vapour is hard to pin down.

It’s that kind of smell that if it was a permanent feature in your home you would have to say: ‘okay, its time to move out’. A lick of paint wont do it, Mr Sheen and his army of fragrance blasters couldn’t do it and the ghost busters would refuse the job point blank so you would have to up sticks and decamp elsewhere – I would give Shake ’n’ Vac a try (if only to do the dance) but we don’t have any carpets!

If your dog does get sprayed by a skunk, the Great Oracles Of Google will inform you to wash your dog in the bath with a quarter cup of baking soda and put them in the garden till they dry in the sun. But when it happens as your just about to go to bed and there’s nothing in the cupboards but a Hershey Bar and a giant packet of Cheeseballs! It makes a worse situation worser.

So the final score at the end of an eventful day was:
Skunk United: 1
Human Dog Wanderers: 0

The Snark Tuner – not just for musical instruments! It keeps both hands free. One to grab a can of beer and the other to open it.