OMG

This post is going to read like someone else's you might know.

Yesterday, I had to go to a large, very horsey, very expensive public school set in hundreds of acres of its own grounds, to pick up some of H.I.'s paintings which she had been persuaded to hang in the corridor of the 6th form girls Art Department for the benefit of the students. The paintings all had price tickets next to them, but even as I put them up I realised that they were a waste of time. None of the rich parents ever set foot in this corridor.

When a scruffy-looking old man like me turns up and asks for access to the 6th form Girl's Art Department, the rigorous security system goes into overdrive.

The first thing you do is fill out the security pass which - once given - you are supposed to wear round your neck at all times. Then you wait in a large reception room for someone to escort you across the grounds to the department. You may not walk anywhere in the grounds unattended.

I was eventually let in via a security-coded lock on the large glass door, shown where the paintings were stored and left alone to pack them and stack them ready to go into the car.

The whole of the corridor is glass on one side and the sun shone through it, making me very hot and sweaty. Already not a good look.

The space in which I was working had a classroom and office at one end and the girls' common room - with tea and coffee making facilities - at the other. I was right next to the common room door.

Half way through the packing, I let out what I thought was going to be a small fart. It was small in volume but huge in potency, and the hot, cramped area where I stood was immediately filled with the most appalling stench. The worst of it was that the only organic things in the corridor at the time were me and a small pot of flowers and I couldn't blame it on one of the many horses a half mile away.

At the end of the corridor, a door opened and about ten seventeen year-old girls walked up toward me and squeezed past where I was working to go into their common room.

It is people like me that give dirty old men a bad name.