Malodorant compositions
Getting up your nose about once a week
Whiffs and pongs
At primary school, we always had the same kind of glue. It was white, it was sometimes branded Copydex, it had a little white spatula, and it always smelled fishy. I’ve just had reason to google “fishy glue” because I’m writing about fish by-products and one is actual fish glue, now known as isinglass and used to refine your beer and wine. Revelation: the fishy glue had no fish in it but the fishiness came from ammonia. Isinglass doesn’t smell fishy, because it is refined from fish swim bladders. Nor does guarine, which is made from fish scales and probably in your lipstick and shampoo.
So I’ve been thinking about smell. I can’t get away from smell, and once I was almost commissioned to write 10,000 words on it. What I love about smell is that it escapes regulation. That is, there are regulations, but you can’t judge what someone smells because you can’t ever know what someone smells. For The Big Necessity, I wrote about the Mogden Pong, an odour that got its own name that local residents near Mogden treatment works in London swore came routinely from their wastewater neighbour.
On 11 July 2007, a Mogden resident called Fullalove sent the following complaint to Thames Water: ‘FOUL YUK STINK STENCH I CANNOT BREATHE IT IS YOUR FAULT.’ Two weeks later, his neighbour Jonathan Oatway wrote despairingly that Mogden was ‘absolutely reeking again after the rain. It was stomach turning. We had to close all the windows but the smell lingered right throughout the house. I was moved to apologise to a guest we had visiting at the time. All very embarrassing considering the raw sewage nature of the odour. It’s a joke living here, why should we live in fear of the stench?’ Whitley Treatment Works, meanwhile, inspired the Whitley Whiff. They have now been replaced by the entirely covered – and odour-free – Reading Wastewater Treatment Works, which cost £80 million to build.
Wastewater treatment plants do smell. But sewers don’t, or not the ones I have visited. Why would they, when we chuck litres of drinking water down the toilet each time?
Thames Water has a great archive of images of the construction of Mogden, here. They’re not very good at not polluting rivers or endlessly contravening Combined Sewer Overflow regulations, but they’re good at photo archives of very impressive sewer construction.
A favourite fact from what my mother calls my shitty book:
There is even an enterprising retired Navy commander called Virginia Ruth Pinney who has taken the stinkiest compound in faeces – skatole – and weaponized it, according to US patent 6,242,489.
The title of the patent is “Malodorant Compositions.”
I have always thought I detested the smell of fish. For years I held my nose when I walked past fishmongers or fish stalls. I definitely dislike the smell of cooked fish, and think anyone who cooks fish in a shared microwave should be made to clean it forever more. My family still talks with wonder of the fact that for my mother’s surprised 70th birthday party, I cooked her a salmon. And so they should: it stank.
But when I went to sea on a trawler, I realised I didn’t detest the smell of fish. I detested the smell of decaying fish, which is what most fish in a fishmonger’s is. Even at Newlyn fish market, I had no trouble. If your fish has not been frozen at sea, on a Frozen at Sea vessel (the fishing industry doesn’t do imagination or lyricism), or fished that day on a pretty trawler and fetched to your plate in some Cornish restaurant will sometimes have been dead for days. Bon appétit.
Tiny Science Corner
This article has blown my mind: clever scientists have re-animated 46,000 year old worms who had been lying frozen in Siberian permafrost. I had no idea science was even attempting that. What those worms must have seen 46,000 years ago. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Etc.
This journal article in Nature Aging was reported as being new and innovative. Scientists attached a young mouse to an old one and the old one was rejuvenated. Innovative? See here and gird yourself for a hideous picture. Parabiosis was first done in the early twentieth century. But seriously, science, will you stop stitching
mice together? It’s the worst kind of human entitlement.
Animal hero of the week: Bailey
PoTs is postural tachycardia syndrome. I learned about it when I had Long Covid, as it can be a symptom (that thankfully I didn’t have). Here is the British Heart Foundation on it:
(PoTS), is a condition that causes an abnormal increase in your heart rate after sitting up or standing up. The most common symptoms are feeling lightheaded or dizzy, palpitations (being aware of your heartbeat) and fatigue. Normally when you sit up or stand up, gravity makes some of your blood flow downwards in your body, which can cause your blood pressure to drop. Your body responds by narrowing your blood vessels and slightly increasing your heart rate to prevent a fall in blood pressure and to maintain blood supply to the heart and brain. But if you have PoTS these automatic changes don’t happen. When you move to an upright position the supply of blood to your heart and brain drops and your heart rate increases to compensate and to try and increase the blood flow.
PoTS is caused by a problem in the autonomic nervous system, the body’s unconscious control system in charge of important functions such as heart rate and breathing.
How totally wondrous the body is, that every time we stand up, we do not fall over because our blood is getting back to where it needs to be.
Anyway. This went a bit viral (can anything be a bit viral?) this week and went more viral in February and has a shedton of views on TikTok, a social media platform I’ve so far resisted, but I’m using the story anyway because Bailey is wonderful.
Katie Graham lives in Georgia and has PoTs and Bailey, a four-year old Australian shepherd who is her service dog. Bailey has been trained to notice when Katie’s body odour changes, because this can signify that her heart is struggling. Bailey jumps on Katie to make her sit down, then fetches her a phone, medicine and a bottle of water.
OK it turns out that this is a demo and there are plenty more on Katie and Bailey’s instagram account @serviceaussiebailey so go and fill your boots at Bailey’s talents. Also, Katie originally got him as a pet and then turned him into super lifesaving dog.