The ordered versus the odoured

Do you often wake up on a Saturday morning feeling utterly exhausted? Despite turning in early the night before, do you lie in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering why you feel like you’ve been physically and mentally pummelled? Is it all to blame on a hard week filled with needy colleagues, needier clients and too little time spent at the gym? Or is your exhaustion the result of nine hours of sleep that saw a battle being fought between your brain’s more liberal and fun-loving hemisphere and its more conservative and intolerant side?

Despite being a very good sleeper I often feel my sluggishness has a lot to do with what happens when I fall into a deep sleep and my head turns into a cinema. Recently the marquee outside the big screen has been promoting a film called “Should I Say or Should I Go: a modern moral dilemma”. Shot in a documentary style, the film is a collection of everyday vignettes in which various characters wrestle with the interruptions and disturbances of modern life. In each story people are pushed to their physical and mental limits by life’s daily annoyances and ultimately have to make a choice of saying something to the perpetrators and potentially creating an explosive situation or walking away and letting others suffer.

Many of the vignettes are quite mundane – the person talking loudly on their phone in an otherwise silent rail carriage; the child running riot in a quiet café on a rainy Sunday; neighbours holding a dance party in a nearby flat; the colleague who chews with their mouth open; the fellow passenger with the volume set too loud and the bass thumping from their headphones – but all force the viewer to consider whether or not they have the right to intervene.

In a world where health and safety officers continue to take the fun out of daily life, I wonder if this state-sponsored nannying is contagious and creates an environment where everyone feels they should be more vigilant about the irritants and dangers of daily life or whether it makes people start to exercise more wild streaks and look to break rules. I tend to think it’s an unworkable combination of the two.

With public smoking stamped out in most corners of countries that deem themselves right and responsible and private puffing increasingly difficult to get away with, I feel sorry for considerate smokers who are being socially ostracised while many others engaged in life-threatening hobbies are allowed to do as they please. Where’s the next flashpoint? Will we soon be presented with such compelling evidence about the dangers of alcohol that beer, wine and spirits will be slapped with massive warnings and images of decaying internal organs? Will this be followed by a ban on drinking in public places (yes, this includes bars and restaurants) and a simple glass of wine will have to be enjoyed with curtains drawn and lights dimmed?

As someone who quite enjoys a glass of something well rounded from Alto Adige, I fear this could easily happen well within the next two decades. While I don’t endorse binge drinking and subsequent anti-social behaviour, I am quite tolerant of noisy pubs, I have no problem with people spilling out on the street so long as they’re considerate of old ladies, kids and mums, and I have no problem with the neighbours getting carried away every now and then. At the same time, however, I’m becoming intolerant (even violent) of our increasingly fragranced world.

I’m not quite sure who’s to blame for the plague of scents that make it near impossible to ride around in a cab, enter a hotel room or linger in a shop that has nothing to do with selling perfume. Some of my prime suspects include Calvin Klein, for creating fragrances that too many have tried to mimic for everything from nappy scents to room sprays, the major multinational chemical companies, for feeling they need to add a scent to everything in their product portfolio (I now go to Italy to stock up on clothing detergent that actually smells like soap rather than like Balinese orchids), and the olfactorily challenged. While my more liberal side feels that everyone should be able to wear or wash with whatever scent they feel appropriate, the more conservative hemisphere in my head is calling out for aggressive legislation to put a stop to this most extreme form of pollution.

For sure, self-regulation is the way to go and manufacturers of those dreadful plug-in room odourisers could start a global cull while taxi company owners could specify an open-window policy for drivers of stinky cars rather than subject passengers to toxic lemony and ylang-ylang fumes. I’m rather convinced that if enough research money was thrown at the scent market there’d be all kinds of evidence for banning certain perfumes from enclosed spaces, vehicles and playgrounds. Just as we’re taught about the dangers of smoking at school, youngsters might also get a course in pleasant scents versus offensive ones.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine

tyler.brule@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/brule