Am I making coffee or enriching uranium?

​A lot of it is to do with the bean grind. Too coarse a grind, and the water flows with unnecessary haste over the bean particles and fails to absorb enough flavour, leaving a weak almost acidic taste to the coffee. Too fine a grind, and the machine will explode killing all within a 200m radius. Nothing is simple these days as we strive for the perfect existence, as prescribed by people with something to sell.

While urinating in the toilet the other day, I found myself reading the words on a bottle of ‘room mist’ on the bathroom shelf. The blurb on this elegant, silver-topped canister (in a calming pastel shade that fancy paint company colour stylists may well call ‘grasshopper’s yawn’) told me this was Balancing Cedarwood and Vetiver. It went on ‘Curl up with a favourite film or novel, rebalancing your senses with comforting cedarwood, dry amber and vetiver scents.’

And here’s me wasting it on covering up the ‘scent’ of an unholy number two when I should have been dousing the living room with the stuff before settling down to an evening of 80s video nasties.

Big business has convinced us that the route to a higher plane in life is through our nostrils. That dancing Shake n’ Vac housewife screeching about ‘putting the freshness back’ while wafting industrial talcum powder over carpets in the 1980s has been put in a choke hold by a Buddhist fragrance guru! We’ve moved on to a Zen vibe for room scents… just don’t read the back of the spray can like I did.

You can rebalance your senses with ‘room scent’ providing you don’t: ’spray near eyes or face.’ And the killer (pun intended) warning: ‘Do not breathe spray. Contents can be fatal.’

Rather than balancing my mood, it rattled it. I was going to chuck the can away, but the warnings continued. ‘Extremely flammable. May burst if heated.’

What is this stuff? Scented napalm! Time to wake up and smell the coffee… enlightenment now comes with a fire warning.