Sharing a pack of gum is uncontroversial, most colleagues won't be
impressed if you help yourself to a swig from their water bottles but my
friend D___ shares her hand cream.
It comes out of her purse (a miracle of discovery worth its own
story), she squeezes a dainty line on her palm, and proffers the tube
to a girl-friend who repeats the manoevure but hesitates before offering
to the next-in-line, yours truly.
"Go on, try it," says D___ , who is often unimpressed by certain
types of male objections, so I do, but what I notice is how ungreasy it
is, how it sinks into my skin and the redolence of exotic sunsets or
some other nonsense which, even as I enjoy, my man-brain snarkily carps
is likely a synthetic pong created in a lab next to Fresh Kills landfill
in Jersey, and now my forearms feel as soft as the proverbial babies
bum.
The next day I go to the ladies' aisle, rather than the section where
they stack the cheap vaseline-based junk for guys and unsophisticated
people who don't know The Secret: Spa Indulgence's
Mediterranean Bliss, infused with Olive Leaf, Fig and Green Tomato.
I rush home, strip off and put dollops of the stuff all over the bod -
a bit of jogging and lots of this stuff and an irresistable summer
physique is just round the corner
—shazaaam, baby !
Then I notice the goup ain't sinking in, I read the label and discover I've schmeered myself with
Mediterranean Bliss Body Wash.