In defence of the nose

Noses are very odd things, are they not? I raise this point tonight because mine is hurting.

There’s a very simple reason for this: I have one of those upper-nostril pimples that should be facing out, but instead has chosen to grow inwards. This means that my conk feels peppery, blocked and sore at the same time. Not only that, but – being at the top end of my nasal inhaler – it’s also giving my eye something of a post boxing-match look. Headaches are another dimension of the affliction. Look, I’m a bloke, right? We get Man-flu, and Fella-hooter-pimple.

About six years ago, I had one of those major life insights. It was this: there is no art form based on what the nose does. OK, I know that you can stretch a point and say there are perfumes….so fragrances are down to the schonk. But I’m sorry, this is cobblers: I like fragrant women and a good after-shave with the best of them, but that’s pure hedonism right? There is nothing hanging up in the Louvres based on a pong.

All the other primary senses have created major art media: paintings, theatre, movies, radio, books, poetry, music, soccer, sex, and even those chairs in motorway service stations that vibrate if you put a pound-coin in. But the schnozzle remains what it is: a functional thing designed to warn one of danger, and raise expectations of excitement to come.

They look funny, too. Noses I mean: they sit there on your face, as it were, sort of meaninglessly placed in the middle. We all have complexes about our noses…far more than about eyes and mouths, although ears run them a close second.

And yet….noses can define a life. Would any of us remember Charles De Gaulle if his nose had been perfectly formed to compete with George Clooney’s? Had Cyrano de Bergerac been the owner of an Elvis Presley nose, would beauty be seen as skin deep, or based largely on nostril protuberance? The English rabble-rouser John Wilkes had a nose so unpleasant, he once remarked, “It takes me thirty minutes to talk women out of my nose, and into my bed”. But the thing is, would he have evoked such fear in Parliament with perfect features? I very much doubt it. The word pugnacious is not exactly about nasal beauty: it is designed to suggest a brawler. Research shows that Rocky Marcianos make better allies than Giorgio Armanis.

How inspired would the British have been in 1940 by a Winston Churchill of restrained proboscis along the aquilines of Pliny? Not much, that’s my opinion. Noses are for sticking in the way of Wehrmacht tanks and saying, “We shall fight until the stain of Nazism has been removed forever from the earth”. You can’t threaten in the same way with a wink of the eye: noses may not follow you round the room, but they scare the living crap out of the Goerings of this world. The phrase in yer face is not talking about ears.

But you shouldn’t assume that’s all noses are all about – viz, being fundamentally barbarian and aggressive.

I don’t know about yours, but mine can drag childhood straight into the present day with just one whiff of a damp leaf or the beginnings of a campfire. And in its ability to do that, the nose thing (the sticky-out bit that looks as if God stuck on a bit of clay as an after thought to the sculpting of the head) is surely more artful than all the other receptors put together.

The smell of furniture polish masking gravy always takes me to 1954, and great-Aunt Lizzie’s house. Disinfectant of any kind is all it takes for me to be sitting in St Margaret’s Infant School in 1956. A hint of cloves, and I’m quivering at Mr Green’s the Dentist in 1957. Brewery aromas can transport me back to floodlit night matches at Old Trafford in the early 1960s. Joss sticks….well, they take us wherever we want to go. Fat and vinegar are all it takes for me to be back at the El Paso Supper Bar in Prestwich, and fish n chips after soccer training on a Wednesday evening. The smell of bacon is the one thing that every vegetarian finds hard to resist. Barbecue smoke takes us all back to the cave.

Raise your glasses to the nose. And before you savour the wine therein, remember that without the sniffing machine to tell you whether or not it’s corked, the taste that comes next might be repellent. To hell with art: every epicurean and historian on the planet reveres the beak – and with good reason.