Thanks to some frankly bizarre decision by the soap-buyer of the household, all of the soap in my house at the moment is of the Grapefruit and Honeydew Melon variety, this coming hot on the heels of a brief flirtation with strawberry soap. Now, perhaps I’m the only one, but I don’t actually want my hands to smell like any kind of fruit product. Indeed, if I’d been handling grapefruits and honeydew melons, I’d wash my hands to remove the smell.

So why are there so many fruit soaps, and so few soaps that actually smell of, well, soap? Looking on a popular online shopping site (Tesco, if you’re interested), there are 40 – that’s forty – kinds of liquid soap scented with fruits, flowers, and other such things that you really wouldn’t want to smell like. There are just 8 – eight – that don’t specify, and so I’m generously assuming smell of soap. So five times more kinds of soap smell of things other than soap, than those soaps which smell soapy. That seems foolish to me. But maybe I just don’t get it.

The evil monster of the ‘Save’ instead ‘Publish’ button strikes again… that’s why this is being published a little over twenty-four hours late… Sorry!