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Trousers Smell Of Old Lady

catseye

catseye

Old lady trouser-smell with yesterday's knickers
Joined
Feb 1, 2010
Messages
8,668
Location
York
Bear with me.

Today I decided to change the bedding and, as is my wont, I also change my pyjamas. My clean sets live on top of a trunk in my bedroom, as I have problems with dust mite allergies so keep them in the open air.

I picked up my pyjama set. These ones are brushed cotton, haven't been worn since spring, as are a bit warm. So, the top is fine, smells just of 'sitting on the trunk'. The trousers, however, smell of 'old lady'. The particular smell of a mix of lavender, soap, talc, I don't know what it is, but it's very reminiscent of little old ladies. Nothing else anywhere in the room has the same smell, although I do have some 'old lady' soap in a drawer, rescued from my late aunt's house.

I hung them on the line to get them aired, kept sniffing them (all right, I know that is odd, but so is unexpectedly finding that your trousers smell of octogenarian) and the smell hung on. Fetched them in to put on - smell gone.

No little old ladies have borrowed my nightwear. So why that smell, and why just those items?
 
catseye said:
Bear with me.

Today I decided to change the bedding and, as is my wont, I also change my pyjamas. My clean sets live on top of a trunk in my bedroom, as I have problems with dust mite allergies so keep them in the open air.

I picked up my pyjama set. These ones are brushed cotton, haven't been worn since spring, as are a bit warm. So, the top is fine, smells just of 'sitting on the trunk'. The trousers, however, smell of 'old lady'. The particular smell of a mix of lavender, soap, talc, I don't know what it is, but it's very reminiscent of little old ladies. Nothing else anywhere in the room has the same smell, although I do have some 'old lady' soap in a drawer, rescued from my late aunt's house.

I hung them on the line to get them aired, kept sniffing them (all right, I know that is odd, but so is unexpectedly finding that your trousers smell of octogenarian) and the smell hung on. Fetched them in to put on - smell gone.

No little old ladies have borrowed my nightwear. So why that smell, and why just those items?
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Dunno, but I once bought a lovely Victorian-style nightie from a jumble sale and wore it to bed after getting myself badly sunburned. Woke up in the early hours with a temperature and that same old lady demanding its return.
 
escargot said:
Dunno, but I once bought a lovely Victorian-style nightie from a jumble sale and wore it to bed after getting myself badly sunburned. Woke up in the early hours with a temperature and that same old lady demanding its return.
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But did your nightie smell of old lady, Scargy? Or just after-sun and skin?
 
À propos smells of old folk . . .

I am getting too close enough to the leaky age to laugh in an unkind way but I well remember listening in to the conversation between a very voluble Irishman and the patient ladies of a charity shop. Those people are an unofficial listening-service for the lost and lonely. I don't know how they do it!

Said man was wondering, you know, if they would do a part-exchange on his coat, on account of the fact that he had just experienced "a very private accident inside of it."

At the time, I took it to mean mere urine. Now I'm wondering if he got his jollies from freaking out the ladies.

Fast forward a few weeks and I see him on the threshold of another shop, wearing the same long, brown mac. The manageress is firmly stating that they are closed; it seems very early, for that. I walk back that way half an hour later to see the shop open again. I am thinking they had a very brief, "private closure!" :wear:

My grandmother may have suffered some inability to detect normal levels of scent in her later years. She took to using an Avon skin-cream of Honeysuckle, which was ridiculously intense. It just tended to make people wonder what it was disguising! :omr:
 
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escargot said:
There was a smell. It was fear.
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CatPiss. The Smell of Fear from Faberge.
Old folks. A simple squirt of CatPiss in you wardrobe will render your old clothes useless for anything other than a charity shop. Thus destroying your undeserving WillHangers the option of selling your old clobber off as Vintage Clothing. CatPiss. Say it with a Squirt.
 
I had a bit of a moment yesterday. I found a bag of my old angst ridden teenage diaries and when I opened the bag the paper smelt positvely ancient. Last time I smelt oldness like that was when I was looking through my granddads postcards that were sent during the war. I feel positvely decrepit, now.
 
I have two wardrobes - one for the current season and one for the off season (i.e. one for spring/summer, one for autumn/winter depending on the time of year).

Whenever I start switching (which I have done in recent days), the clothes in the "off season" wardrobe always smell a tad... off. And old-ladyish.

It must be a combination of stale detergent, old wood and dust.
 
fizzy55 said:
I had a bit of a moment yesterday. I found a bag of my old angst ridden teenage diaries and when I opened the bag the paper smelt positvely ancient. Last time I smelt oldness like that was when I was looking through my granddads postcards that were sent during the war. I feel positvely decrepit, now.
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We need to hear more about the angst ridden teenage diaries, please.
 
Analogue Boy said:
CatPiss. The Smell of Fear from Faberge.
Old folks. A simple squirt of CatPiss in you wardrobe will render your old clothes useless for anything other than a charity shop. Thus destroying your undeserving WillHangers the option of selling your old clobber off as Vintage Clothing. CatPiss. Say it with a Squirt.
Click to expand...

Couple of years back at work I left my coat draped over my bike as usual and when I returned there was a sign on the wall above it -
'CAT PISS CORNER'
I'm assuming one of my cats or a visitor had sprayed my jacket or the bike although I couldn't smell it. Coat was hurriedly washed before my next shift!
 
The smell is completely gone now. It's not on anything else either.

The only reasonable explanation is that, one afternoon when I was out, a little old lady broke in, rolled gleefully around on my pyjama trousers and then left.

It wouldn't be the oddest thing that's happened in this house...
 
escargot I'm not sure you would, to be honest. I'm sure I was only as angst ridden as the next teenager, but getting older doesn't seem so bad now I've reminded myself how being young feels. The drama of everything! The mood swings! Oh wait, I still have them
 
fizzy55 said:
escargot I'm not sure you would, to be honest. I'm sure I was only as angst ridden as the next teenager, but getting older doesn't seem so bad now I've reminded myself how being young feels. The drama of everything! The mood swings! Oh wait, I still have them
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:lolling:

Can remember starting to write diaries as a teenager but deciding to discontinue, mainly because my family had no concept of privacy and wherever I hid my personal and private writings they WOULD be hunted down and read out over the dinner table.
 
! Good job my mother didn't find mine (as far as I know.) I started a short story for a school project at the begining of one of them. The first line was something along the lines of "Done my first murder today and no one even suspects, so planning next one."
I hope you got your own back, escargot! I would have been mortified lol
 
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"I wanted to strangle my mother but I'd have to touch her to do it."

Not my own but pinched from another source. Very useful in a creative-writing class.

Give them just the first seven words and ask them to go on. Almost everyone will wimp-out in the continuation, except the natural writers*! :evillaugh:

*and the psychopaths!
 
fizzy55 said:
! Good job my mother didn't find mine (as far as I know.) I started a short story for a school project at the begining of one of them. The first line was something along the lines of "Done my first murder today and no one even suspects, so planning next one."
I hope you got your own back, escargot! I would have been mortified lol
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Hahaha, nope, I didn't write diaries. FAR too risky.

Not that I was up to anything dicey, I just wasn't having one read out by my creepy family, not even 'Today we had Maths with geometry which I like. I much prefer geometry over algebra.'
 
Sister! I prefer geometry too!

JamesWhitehead said:
My grandmother may have suffered some inability to detect normal levels of scent in her later years. She took to using an Avon skin-cream of Honeysuckle, which was ridiculously intense.
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There is a correlation between dementia and a deteriorating sense of smell.
(I will exclude from this correlation not noticing the fragrance of cat spray (Eau de Felidae), which any human with strong emotional attachments to cats could be immune to.)
 
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