Chemical reactions.

The wonderful Phoebe has just had her hair cut, a process which involves not only visual beautifying but also dog cologne. It's not a perfume you or I might choose to wear (well, I wouldn't; I suppose I can't speak for all of you; there are some crazy people out there, and I suspect a lot of them read this blog), but it smells pretty good on a dog. It's a sort of slightly doggy air-freshener furniture-polish sort of a smell.

Now, Monty has a bit of a smell himself, as he has some sort of skin complaint and the worst breath on this planet. We've gotten used to it, but it still kind of hits us now and then, especially when he burps in our faces. It's a stale pungent yeasty doggy biscuity affair.

So we get back from work today and open the door to the kitchen (wherein the dogs are stored during the day), and the two smells had combined into an unmistakeable new smell. We both agreed: it was the smell of very old women. It was as if an old people's home had taken over our kitchen for a week.

So it turns out that, when human females reach the age of about eighty, they start to smell exactly like a combination of a dog with dodgy digestion and chronic dandruff and a dog wearing aftershave. Quite surprising, that.