When we enter the supermarket, my wife turns immediately right towards the clothes section, while I make a beeline for all things electrical.

After we have spent the allotted time in our initial selected areas, we head off towards the food where we begin our weekly shop. Mrs M has a tendency to wander during this time, but I am comforted by the fact that I will always know where to find her.

I take a deep breath and follow my nose towards the air freshener aisle.

My wife just loves looking at items designed to rid your home of any sign that people actually live there.

Over our time together, we have tried all manner of contraptions brought out by sweet-smelling companies looking to get their hands on our cash.

There seems to be a pattern in how they attract Mrs M to their products; they sell the initial unit at a reasonable price, only to want a small fortune for the refills.

I am not sure what it costs to produce the smell of clean linen, but you would suspect they find it next to the blood diamonds in some South African mine.

A close second to air fresheners are candles. These are a regular purchase when we shop and have the ability to draw my wife down many a side street in cities that we visit toward odd shops that deal in nothing but wax.

We entered one last week, and when we did so, my self-defence mechanism tried to work out whether this was a fight-or-flight moment and I left after only one breath and two sneezes.

Either my wife was holding her breath like some underwater swimmer, or candle shops are her natural habitat. Either way, she seemed perfectly at ease with the various and conflicting odours on offer.

As I made my escape, I overheard the shopkeeper say that most men struggle to stay in the store.

As she left the shop, my wife showed me her purchases, and I duly sneezed again. In addition to the candle she had bought, she showed me the latest item aimed at taking our hard-earned wage.

It is a small container of liquid that smells of vanilla, only this doesn’t have any electronics attached in order to fill your room with freshness every time it senses a human being.

This one has six or seven sticks in it that you occasionally turn over so that the smell of ice-cream is available to make you believe you had no other use for the six pounds you had lost during the purchase.

I pointed out that she had paid more for this item even though she has to do all the work herself, but my wife was intoxicated by the sweet smell of marketing.