Editorial: This odour obsession is on the nose

Not the best place to nest while the birds are overhead - one of the soiled bench seats outside the Napier Public Library.

The sense of smell seems to have put a few local noses out of joint.

A few months back my neighbour had a panic attack over a chicken & chips dairy opening at the end of our street. The oily discharge from its deep fryer chimney apparently something to be much afraid of.

Then headlines about bird guano imparting an objectionable stench to the Napier Library environs. But of course the biggest stink over stink yet - Hawke's Bay Regional Council's decision to prosecute Te Mata Mushrooms after the two parties reached an impasse over the latter's odours. Te Mata Mushrooms was the aboriginal settler on Brookvale Rd - well developed before the arrival of subdivision colonists.

Notwithstanding this, council has stressed that it, and the enduring business, are bound to give due consideration to "the changing expectations of the community". The question is, if the community's olfactory threshold has changed, how so? Is there an algorithm for calculating a residential street's critical mass, where a smell was once tolerable, but now is not?

One assumes council can quantify the findings collated by their nasal rangers.

All this fuss made me think of the advent of the Victorian nosegay. A nosegay (ie, keep the nose "happy"), was a small bunch of fragrant flowers or herbs, tied in a bundle, (which has now morphed into the modern day corsage) originally intended to be worn on one's lapel, under the nose, to mask unpleasant odours.

A few centuries on, whether it's bird droppings, chicken fat or mushroom fertiliser, odours still go hand-in-glove with suburbia. (Try visiting Shanghai). Undoubtedly expectations of how clean one's nose must be, have changed. After all, Elizabeth I reportedly bathed just once a month. But those whose mission it is to live in an increasingly deoderised climate need a little perspective, and perhaps, a quaint little nosegay.