For the sake of my health, I decide to eat a lot of fish. I go into Tesco and get some Alaskan wild salmon fillets, apparently the healthiest fish you can eat.
I get the fish home. I open the packet. I sniff the fish. That’s what you do with fish, don’t you? You sniff it.
There’s a moment when you think, well, of course it smells. It’s fish, isn’t it? And you smell it again. And now you’re confused.
On the one hand, it really, really stinks.
On the other hand… maybe you’re just being oversensitive. It happens.
I put the fish back in the fridge and eat something else. Later, out of curiosity, I open the fridge again, and it’s much, much worse. It doesn’t smell fishy-bad. It smells bad-bad. How can I describe it? I remember this guy I knew as a kid, and he stank, and I kept wondering what it was about him that could smell so bad, and I thought, in the end, that it must have been his arse. That’s all it could have been. Something wrong with his arse.
So I take the fish back to Tesco. There are two people at Customer Services. I open the fish. As the woman bends down to smell it, I waft the bag, so she gets an extra bit of stinky air.
But she can’t smell anything.
The guy bends down. (No wafting this time. Maybe the wafting worked against me.) I wait for the verdict.
He nods.
I swap the fish for another bit of fish. I open it. I smell it.
I smell it again. And again.
I think it’s fine.