Stinky jeans

Last night the Curmudgeon and I went to the flicks. We ate choc tops and jaffas and saw The Artist – I loved it. I was spellbound but for one thing.

About half-way through, I noticed a mild stink. A sort of unwashed persony stink. I sniffed the Curmudgeon to my right… it wasn’t him. And the pair of ladies to my left were terribly nice nice nice and unlikely to be the culprits. Which left… me. I was generating a cloud of unpleasantness, confirmed when the lights came on and I investigated further. I’m sure the nice nice nice ladies discussed the foetid person sitting next to them as they had a post-flick hot chocolate. Eek!

I was wearing my one and only pair of jeans which have been loitering in a drawer for most of summer. I suspect I wore them once then put them away for months when I should have washed them first. Oh, the shame. Today they were soaked and scrubbed and are drying in the sun and I promise I’ll never do it again.

However, the reason why I’m airing my dirty laundry on teh interwebs is because the NGV has an exhibition called Nobody was Dirty running from 10-31 March that features jeans worn and unwashed for three months. Apparently it’s to explore social norms around cleanliness and germophobic mindsets, blahdy blah.

Now, I must protest… I like cleanth, generally, but I’m not a clean freak. I consider garden dirt to be clean dirt and I consider compost under the fingernails is the mark of a great weekend rather than suboptimal personal hygiene. I buy most things secondhand and dive in skips for treasures. I fear germs not. I think the folks who fall for all the advertising propaganda about germicidal hand wash and room fresheners are nut bars. But I have a sensitive nose – at least, it’s much more sensitive than the Curmudgeon’s. And I do not like to be on either the receiving or delivery end of human-generated stink. So how could anyone wear the same pair of dacks 90 days in a row? How could they bear their own odour? Or does it get to the point where a second wave of bacterial colonisation chases off the first stench-generating germs?

When we got home last night, we startled a possum that was on our front fence. It hurled itself to the ground via the Curmugeon’s shoulders when we opened the gate, then skittled up the back of my leg. Just above my knee, it changed its mind, jumped down and climbed a nearby tree. Was it, too, repulsed by the stinky jeans?