My name is John Hodges, and I am a nose.

Yes, yes. Laugh it up, imagining that I am some sort of animated character or someone with an elephantine proboscis.

No. I am a nose – which in the industry is the name given to an expert perfumer.

What that means is that my nose is naturally very talented in distinguishing certain scent ingredients and then combining them into the perfect perfume. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to take that natural talent – which is just a matter of luck in the gene lottery – and train it further to the point that I can create the very best perfume for anyone.

I know that sounds boastful, but I’m not trying to be. It’s just a matter of fact. Sommeliers are born with a unique sense of taste and then hone that to a fine edge to enable them to become the finest wine-tasters. In turn, wine-tasters are vital in the wine industry, not only because they can take the pressings from various grapes and combine them into a truly excellent wine; they can also advise people on what is good and what is average. When a bottle of wine can go for over half a million dollars – such as the 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Grand Cru auctioned in 2018 – that knowledge can mean the difference between riches or penury.

In the same way that a true sommelier is quite rare and is therefore able to demand high prices for his services, so too can a true perfumer.

Perfumes are often made from very expensive ingredients: for instance, oud oil is made from melting the resin of an endangered species of tree – but only after it has been infected by a certain type of mould and only around two percent of these trees are so infected. You can imagine; you have to find a small forest of these rare trees, then you have to get permission to mess with the trees because they are endangered, and then you have to find which – if any – have been infected by a specific species of fungus. After that it’s easy; you just have to sit on your hands for a long time. The tree protects itself from the mould by creating a certain type of resin, so you just wait for it to ooze out, collect it and then melt it down, making sure to leave enough that the mould doesn’t overcome the tree and kill it. That’s why it’s more expensive by weight than gold.

Ambergris is the stuff that perhaps 1% of sperm whales – and only that species of whale – vomit or crap out. It’s sometimes formed inside the intestines when something sharp, like the beak of a giant squid, gets stuck in the whale’s gut and irritates it enough. Unprocessed, it smells like shit that’s been floating in the sea for a long time – which often it is and has. Processed, it’s the scent of magic.

These oils have been discovered, distilled and formulated over centuries, and are incredibly rare. It’s not like they just grow on trees or wash up on the beach ... Okay, oud does grow on trees and ambergris does wash up on beaches – bad examples. But you get my meaning; this is incredibly expensive stuff!

So, if you want to make a new perfume that will really sell – and so many football players and actresses seem to want to – you have to invest a shit-ton of money. And before you do that you want to get the perfume exactly right first; in the lab.

All of which explanation is just to show why I get really well paid and – by sometimes creating a unique perfume specific to just a single client – why I am sometimes invited into the company of the rich and the famous and the beautiful.

When I met my wife, I had been commissioned to create a perfume specifically for a singing star – Arabella; she of the most wondrous voice while singing and the most awful regional accent while speaking. Still, she has a sharp sense of humour and is always great fun to be around. And of course, she also writes and sings heart-rending songs.

I apologise, but to explain the next part, I have to go into the technical again. Perfumery is a technical business.

The best scent for any person is based on their own natural scent – which of course they have been around all their life and therefore can’t really smell it. So take a hint, if you think a scent is really good and strong, it’s not for you. The best scent is one that you can hardly smell at all. Take that and boost it up. Simple!

Except which of your scents is the best? It changes all the time. Most of you who enjoy blow jobs – getting or giving – know that eating pineapple will make the taste of cum a lot more pleasant for the person who is giving their all for your benefit. Your scent will change in the same way: eat pineapple and your scent swings towards the citrus; drink a lot of rum and your scent becomes sweeter. Be constipated for a week and God – you really don’t want to know.

So I have to take samples at various times and average them out. Then I create the scent, using my nose to get it exactly right, and boost up the strength of that aroma so that the wearer always smells wonderful and really attractive. And then it’s ‘thank you, dear client, for that rather large cheque!’

Now back to Arabella. As she lives for the most part in the south of France, and I really didn’t want to commute that far every few days during the collection period, she had invited me to stay at her villa.

By this point, some of you will probably be thinking ‘Stuck up ponce, with his fancy froufrou and la-di-da ways’, which would really be unfair. I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, got a barely decent education, joined a street gang as a full-blooded member and almost ended up as a drug mule. After a short but very violent war with a neighbouring gang, I decided to rethink my ambitions, and only then did I discover that my schnozzle might be valuable as more than just an air filter.

After literally begging for a place, it took ten years to go through the mill at one of France’s best perfumeries. While there, at various times I actually almost starved to death, became allergic to several perfume chemicals from having to sniff them constantly, almost became addicted – twice, and still had to sweep and clean the factory on my one day off a fortnight. So if you think me a stuck-up ponce, then fuck you! I’ll fucking kneecap you and walk away laughing, you bastard!

Ah, see, unfortunately my roots are still strong.

To be fair, in order to sell my product – which is me – I do have to schmooze with the great and the good, and therefore have to dress up in my best airs and graces before going on the world stage, so I might come across as a little less than alpha male.

Besides being a singer constantly on the album charts, Arabella was a famed hostess to the stars of stage, screen, music, art and the football pitch, and her villa always seemed to be full of the weirdest mixture of people you can imagine. And yet somehow, the mix was almost always perfect and everyone got on. Except when they didn’t, which was usually when somebody called somebody else a stuck-up ponce with his fancy froufrou and la-di-da ways. Of course they would apologise, but I always made sure it was dark and nobody saw me when I stuck the boot in to get that apology.

Actually, that happened rarely, and most of the time I enjoyed my time there. Although celebrities tend to be arseholes with the public, when they’re together – because they’re all stars – they’re all fairly equal and don’t try and pull the bullshit over each other’s eyes too much. And when they insist on doing that, then we’re back to the dark and the sticking in of the boot. Eventually Arabella was worried enough to have infra-red security cameras installed in and around the villa and I had to stop doing that.

It was there that I met Jade Tyger. I know – I sniggered when I first heard the name as well. But, it turns out that it’s actually her real name, and her clueless parents had no inkling that they were starting her down a school career of being constantly bullied because of her name and height.

She was quiet until she got a few drinks down her neck, and then she was a party girl. By party, I mean happy and dancing and singing. I never once saw her get roofied or gang banged or forced to pull a train, so they were a different type of party to those in the USA, apparently. Yes, she was quiet, except when she wasn’t. And she was beautiful, except when she ... actually she was exquisitely beautiful all the time.

Jade was a world famous model, as you might remember. I first saw her when I was exiting the big hot tub that overlooked Arabella’s world famous sculpture garden – the one studded with statues and installations by every nutter with a beard that Arabella ever met. I was leaving, bumped into Jade who was on her way in, made an immediate U-turn and did another two hour stint in the tub that left me like a prune over 92% of my body.

Totally worth it though. I hauled out my very best efforts, dusted them off and managed to charm her enough that she agreed to have dinner with me. From there I managed to convert that into a second, third and fourth date, and thence to a weekend in Monaco. From then on we were a couple.

Jade, my little tiger, was as tall as me – almost six foot – with black hair that fell down in gentle waves to just below her butt cheeks. In fact her hair was so long that it was often lower than the hems on some of the skirts she would wear – which demonstrates how long her hair was, how short the skirts were, and why my wife always had to wear clean, pretty, full bikini panties when we left the house. Try ‘upskirt’ on Google – she’ll be there, I’m sure.

She doesn’t care. Fashion models have no personal embarrassment about their bodies. Over two years I attended many fashion shows in which she took pride of place, and the number of naked and semi-naked bodies in the single change room was stunning. There were dressers, hairdressers, make-up artists, assistants, runners and even set dressers running to and fro like blue-arsed flies, and half of them were men. Only I seemed to be ogling however, which made my wife smile and shake her head, while the other models giggled and played up to me.

In fact the only time it was different was when a presidential hopeful appeared in the audience, and then the change room was immediately barred to all men, including me. I have no idea why that happened.

I didn’t mind the skirt length or her flashing her knickers. I was proud that she was on my arm and wearing my ring, and as long as it stayed exactly that way, I was more than happy.

She was twenty three when we met, and her face was that of a sexy little girl. I know that sounds more than perverted, but I can’t help that; it wasn’t my face to change. She had huge green eyes, the biggest I’ve ever seen outside of anime movies, a small little nose, and the loveliest lips over a sharp little chin. She was thinner than I would have preferred, but then she was a model, so that was predictable. And the slightly hollow cheeks made her look twelve; an incredibly beautiful twelve with surprisingly nice tits – two good handfuls. She didn’t become a super model solely because of her dress sense, believe me – although designers would, and actually did on two occasions, fight to have her wear their clothes, jewellery, make-up ... anything they wanted women to want. She was that good.

Her body’s scent was sublime, with top notes of mandarin and bergamot, a heart of jasmine and vanilla, and a strong base note of woman-in-heat. God I loved that natural scent of hers.

We didn’t sleep together until that weekend in Monaco, which puzzled me, as models tend to have a reputation: not for being easy, but rather only being available to men who needed to carry their wallets in a luxury version of the little red wagon. So I was very surprised that she slept with me that weekend. By Monday I was too exhausted to be surprised about anything. On the plus side, her legs still wobbled when she walked down the catwalk on Tuesday, so I felt vindicated. Apparently my cheesy grin in the audience was very visible to the models as they swayed, stomped and sashayed down the runway, and my girlfriend was teased a lot. I don’t think she really minded.

Six months and an exhaustive amount of sex later, we were married in a relatively small ceremony, although the number of exquisite beauties on her side of the church was quite stunning; as was the amount of scent from friends on my side of the aisle.

We wandered far and wide around the world together, going where her career and my clients called us. I think those two years were the happiest in my whole life.

Then came that conversation.

“Honey, we need to talk.”

Surprisingly, it was me who said it – mainly because we did need to, really badly.

She seemed a little distracted, partly because I was sitting with a bandage on my head after being taken out by some beginner on the intermediate slopes at St. Moritz in Switzerland. Some obnoxious little toe rag collided with me, knocked me down and then tried to ski off without a word of apology. Jade had stood there leaning on her ski poles laughing, and neither of us saw Mother Toe Rag, trying to catch up to her little psychopath, ski hopelessly into me and catch me with the tip of her ski on the side of my head. Bitch! Jade had immediately taken on the job of calling for help, as I was sleeping at the time and didn’t want to do it. I woke up in hospital.

And here we were, a week later having that conversation.

“Jade, what did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean! It’s unforgiveable!”

Jade suddenly went very pale. “No honey, nothing is unforgiveable.”

“Yes, it bloody well is. You knew what I was like. You knew I would never stand for it.”

Jade now had tears in her eyes, which I thought was a bit extreme.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry!”

“What did you do, come on. I want to know exactly!”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“It must have been bad! I can smell it on you. You know what my nose is like!”

She rushed over and knelt at my feet, clutching me around the knees. She is a strange woman at times, my wife.

“John, I love you and I made a mistake. Please forgive me.”

“I can’t forgive anything until you confess what you ate.”

“It was just a handjob and it didn’t mean ... what do you mean ‘ate’?”

“Never mind ate. What do you mean ‘just a handjob’?”

“You thought I’d eaten something ... Oh my god!”