The weather is like the Government: always in the wrong. So said Victorian writer Jerome K Jerome, capturing our national habit of moaning come rain, snow, hail – or heat dome. Well I’m sorry, I feel entitled to complain when the bedroom is 38C all night, the kitchen is invaded by flies, and the streets are athrong with topless men.

Worst of all? The way the heat projects the poison that most people call perfume.

Walking down a busy, sweltering street yesterday, my nose was assaulted at every turn: a blast of Chanel Coco Mademoiselle; a stab of YSL’s Black Opium; a nauseating wave of Marc Jacobs Daisy.

Floral, sweet, woody, musky – the heat transforms these scents from personal expression to public experience, and I cannot stand it.

It didn’t used to be this way, did it? Passers-by so dripping with scent that it makes your eyes water? When did a dab behind the ears become a full-body immersion in Armani Diamonds before leaving the house?

What my nostrils had already told me, the news confirms: Britain’s fragrance market is undergoing a boom. Sales grew 8 per cent to £3.3billion last year. We are now the largest market in Europe.

This is partly driven by the trend of scent-layering: spritzing grapefruit on top of jasmine on top of Eau de Moi to create your own signature scent. Building up these ‘fragrance wardrobes’ comes at a price, with the average customer spend on perfumes increasing by nearly a fifth in two years.

How lovely for the profit margins of Dior and Guerlain – and how ghastly for people like me.

For the past nine years I have suffered from something called hyperosmia – an extreme sensitivity to certain smells, particularly strong fragrances.

It began with my first pregnancy in 2017, when the usual nausea was heightened by a whiff of tuberose or amber. Scents such as Thierry Mugler Alien made me gag.

This caused some friction with my aftershave-loving husband, who used to like marinating himself in Abercrombie Fierce. Thankfully he got the memo that I simply cannot stand the stuff in our house and now only wears it at work.

The fragrance aversion worsened through three subsequent pregnancies. These days if I see a fellow train passenger grab a perfume bottle from their bag for a quick spritz, I will bolt to another carriage as though fleeing tear gas.

This may sound hopelessly fussy, but by ‘aversion’ I don’t mean dislike. I mean nausea, headaches, migraines. Fragrance irritates the trigeminal nerve (a cranial nerve responsible for both sensory and motor functions in the face), causes blood vessels in the head to widen, inflames the sinuses – and is it any wonder, considering the chemicals they contain?

We might like to imagine some artisan perfumier picking those rose petals by hand, but these are chemical-packed substances doing goodness knows what to the body and brain.

This stuff doesn’t just sit on you, it enters your body via the skin and lungs. It gets into your blood stream. Some common fragrance ingredients disrupt the endocrine system, which creates hormones.

Similar to hyperosmia is multiple chemical sensitivity, a chronic condition which leaves sufferers with symptoms like brain fog, breathlessness and fatigue when exposed to everyday chemicals.

Yet few people wonder what all these chemicals are doing to us. As toxicologist Dr Yvonne Burkart says: ‘It’s weird, we’ll question our food, our water, even our cookware, but perfume or fragrance somehow gets a free pass.’

Indeed. Imagine you picked up an ultra-processed ready meal and, looking for the list of ingredients, you just found the word ‘food’. You would think it a total outrage.

Yet thanks to trade secrets legislation, this is exactly the kind of secrecy perfume companies can hide behind. The word ‘fragrance’ or ‘parfum’ may mask hundreds of chemicals. Of course, fragrance isn’t just in perfumes but in candles, detergents, cleaning products, shower gels with weird flavours like ‘space candy and coconut cream’, and air fresheners in taxis.

A couple of weeks ago I opened a cab door only to be hit with a fierce wave of oud, the very heavy scent which comes from the heartwood of an Aquilaria tree.

Sometimes I can mouth-breathe through the journey but on this occasion the pong was so strong I had to back away, muttering ‘sorry, I’ve decided I’m going to walk’ to the perplexed driver.

I hold my breath when speeding through the obligatory Duty Free section at airports, fending off those perfume-toting women like they are spraying industrial pesticides. A particular bugbear is the shop Lush, which sells highly perfumed bath bombs, aka migraine balls.

In normal times sufferers like me can take steps to avoid triggers. In a heatwave it can be unavoidable. On hot, moist skin, fragrance molecules transition from liquid to gas much faster, meaning that cologne wearer approaching you on the street is essentially a walking, 6ft-tall plug-in air freshener.

If I had my way we would have a public health campaign asking people to tone down their scent on transport networks and in some workplaces.

This isn’t new: those sensible people in Canada have fragrance bans across the country. In Nova Scotia they’ve outlawed perfume in government buildings, schools and hospitals.

I accept that this won’t be high on our next PM’s list of priorities. So instead, here’s a plea to the spritz-happy: when the mercury’s above 30C, tone down your perfume. Please.

I know the pain of losing a political job

As double acts go, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves aren’t the most popular, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them on Monday.

Seeing their riven faces reminded me of the evening of the General Election in 2015. I had written a resignation speech for David Cameron in case we didn’t win (which, of course, we did). Along with other aides, I watched him practice it ashen-faced, some of us in tears.

It’s easy to forget that behind the headlines are people whose jobs will be lost and whose dreams of public service have come crashing to an end. As a human – if not as a voter – I feel for them.

How to ace a Hollywood marriage 

It’s so refreshing that Spider-Man actors Tom Holland and Zendaya had a quiet wedding: no public photoshoots, no Instagram dumps. 

In the first pictures shared since they tied the knot in secret, they were all smiles and kisses together in Rome. 

While I don’t want to jinx it, this is how to do a celebrity marriage.

The hellish flaw of my 1950s house

I write this from the seventh circle of hell, also known as my living room, where it is hotter than the African savannah. With its low ceilings, small windows and heaps of insulation, my 1950s-built house simply isn’t fit for purpose. If every summer is to be like this, we urgently need to factor the heat into house-building.

The hot weather has been terrible for my Amazon Prime addiction. A stream of brown parcels has arrived at my door: sunshield for the windscreen, splash pad, ice lolly moulds, desk fans, hand-held fans, neck fan, ice stick trays (because cubes are so passé). Never mind the Met office – I’m waiting for a red warning from my bank. 

Hurray for British tourist Rachel Rodgers, filmed pulling towels from ‘saved’ loungers at a Tenerife hotel in a clip that has gone viral on social media.

Her mission: to give ‘hoggers a nasty surprise’. Quite right. Hopefully her actions will spur on more sunbed vigilantes.