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 Over the past few
months I have been soaking up your newsletter’s contents with loving
care and attention, and let me tell you without equivocation that it
stinks through and through.
It would be
ridiculous to assert however, that the news is all grim. At least one can
say that the smell does at least vary from issue to issue.
In issue two, for
instance, I can vaguely detect the stench of diseased crayfish, while two
issues later I am vividly reminded of the putrid piquancy of the
catastrophic compost heap my grandfather kept, unaerated, during his
seven-year sojourn in good old Nyasaland.
Number five
deserves to become internationally famous; it positively (and
breathtakingly) reeks of Danish cheese in a Paris sewer. Number six, on
the other hand, is a grievous disappointment and will probably be better
quickly forgotten. The best it can do seems to be a feeble aroma of
burning flesh.
For a unique
olfactory experience, however, I cannot too highly recommend issue three.
What a loathsome mixture! Never in my born days have I come across such a
subtle combination of so many evil-smelling effluvia. From every line
there emanates a continuous trail of foully odoriferous words and phrases,
not even as little as two percent of which any proboscis in the known
universe could ever otherwise be expected to get a whiff of in a lifetime.
Yet in all honesty
I am obliged to confess that many of these bouquets eluded me for several
days, and a couple of the more exotic scents for the best part of a month.
Nonetheless, it pleases me to announce that by dint of painstaking
research into dozens of Babylonian perfume catalogues, and thanks to an
almost superhuman effort of nasal imagination, those mysterious odours are
now at last identified and recorded for the nostril of a hopefully
grateful fragrance-conscious posterity. All will be revealed in my
shortly-to-be-published in-your-face dissertation Noses and What Gets
up Them.
Meanwhile, Bikwil,
happy first birthday!
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