Last updated 13:36, Thursday, 25 September 2008

IF she wasn’t already fully employed looking after me, Mrs Hextol would have been a wonderful asset to any police force.

Many paths: Mike Smith may have retired from teaching in July, but he is still heavily involved in his many other interests.

No, I’m not talking about her ability to quell miscreants with her renowned “thriple eyes” manoeuvre, which involves glaring at them in three distinct stages of blazing intensity, until they are reduced to a jelly.

Nor do I mean her negotiating skills, which once saw her talking a violent, drug-crazed teenager, who had barricaded himself into a neighbour’s house, into giving himself up to the police like a lamb.

No, it’s her nose.

She has always had the ability to wiggle it, like the divine Samantha on the ’60s TV show Bewitched.

But it is also the most sensitive piece of nasal equipment in the Northern hemisphere.

With me, four robust sons and a flatulent dog on the premises for many years, there was always a very real risk of gastro-intestinal leakages at any time, but there was never a chance of blaming anyone else for unexpected odours, or pointing out that the farmer was muck spreading.

“Don’t give me that, you stinking creature,” she would bark, flapping at the source of the offending flatus with a well-aimed tea-towel. “That was one of yours!

“Get out into the garden!”

No piece of meat is ever cooked in Hextol Towers unless it has been given the nasal once over, sell by date or not.

The Mrs Hextol hooter has been in overdrive on domestic duties in recent months, as she has stood, quivering like a pointer in the presence of partridges, detecting that all was not well in the bathroom.

My nose is rather less sensitive than Ayers Rock, and I professed I could detect only the usual pleasant whiff of toothpaste and pink Camay.

Shaking her head in exasperation, she still insisted there was a problem with the drains, so I was obliged to pour pungent chemicals into the bath, uncouple the bendy pipe from the washbasin, and look behind the bath panel.

Mrs Hextol kept her usual distance, almost a centimetre behind me, but on the verge of flight should I unearth a decomposing rat or some other unpleasantness.

But there was nothing there, no matter how hard I looked – and then her eyes lit on the light dangling innocently from the ceiling.

“It must be that,” she declared. “We’ve checked everything else.”

“How can it be?” I said, somewhat querulously, but to humour her, I climbed on the stool and unscrewed the shade – and was almost knocked over by the noxious niff.

Apparently, there had been some deterioration of part of the fitting, which I only picked up when it was literally under my nose.

She had smelled it from downstairs ...

The dust had barely settled on that little episode when her nostrils were vibrating again, after the 36-hour monsoon a couple of weeks ago, and I heard the dreaded words: “Can you smell that smell ....?

I registered zero on the conkometer, but she shoved me upstairs, and ordered me to stick my nose in the airing cupboard.

Once again, I could only pick up the pleasant waft of Comfort and cleanliness, but she insisted: “Surely you can smell that; it’s like a wet floor cloth that hasn’t been washed out.”

I checked for leaks from the cylinder and the hot water tank, and wiggled my hands around for traces of damp-ness, but everywhere seemed drier than a Free Church Sabbath.

The next day, I received a telephone call from Mrs Hextol, reporting that she had delved into the furthest corner of the airing cupboard, and discovered a whole stack of towels and curtains were sodden, and stinking the place out.

How I had missed them I do not know, and how they had become wet is more of a mystery.

I made the dreaded journey up into the loft, praying that the loft ladder would not collapse, and then picked my way through the Christmas decorations, 1970s stair carpets and Atari consoles to the area above the airing cupboard, expecting to find a gaping hole in the roof, and those funny bits of polystyrene they put round the water tank floating in a mini lake of rainwater.

The roofing felt was sound, and the fibreglass loft insulation was bone dry, in the eight-foot radius I combed around the airing cupboard roof.

Anyone got any ideas where the water may have come from?