WHO'D be a teacher? You have to deal daily with a group of ill-behaved, illiterate dope fiends and try to get some education past the Teflon coating that shields their thick skulls from knowledge. And that's just the reception class.

As the little darlings get older, things become more complicated, and as the hormones kick in, it seems there is now a new menace - what is known as the Lynx effect.

You may have noticed adverts for this noxious substance, sold to gullible males everywhere on the dodgy premise that it will make women mud-wrestle naked for their favours.

And according to the Staff Room, the teachers' forum on the Times Educational Supplement website, Lynx is now "the smell of Year Nine" - the drug of choice for pubescent lads who rather touchingly believe it will help their coursework in the university of life.

The forum shares tales of threatened asthma attacks and choking fits brought on by pupils' devotion to the brand (slogan: Spray More, Get More).

All over England, classroom windows are being opened to clear the air and canisters are being confiscated by Sir or Miss in an effort to eradicate the stench.

"How can this appalling smell be got rid of?" gasps one despairing teacher. "They come in reeking of sweat after lunch, then spray that all over, thus mixing rancid boy smells with rancid chemical... it's the Sunny D of deodorant."

"So that's the smell," writes another. "I thought the class gerbil had died and a cat had peed on one of my students."

The thread runs on for 75 entries, with some male teachers blushingly confessing that they wear Lynx; some women teachers describing how they weaned their husbands and boyfriends off it; and some speculation that the kids are so hyper in the afternoons that they may be snorting Lynx rather than dabbing it behind the ears.

The manufacturers of Lynx say the teachers' comments are "fascinating"; that Lynx is massively successful; and that teachers should think themselves lucky they weren't working in the Seventies, when Brut was all the rage.

The scary thing is that a lot of these teachers are probably too young to remember Brut, which blasted the corridors of my secondary school like a mustard gas attack. The worst of it was that the girls - myself included - used to wear gallons of it, too, then wonder why we all had splitting headaches by 11am.

Those who didn't go for Brut were no better, usually drenching themselves with Charlie, Aqua Manda or that crime against lung health, Tabu, which my grandad used to know as Eau De Pussmuck.

Later, in my college years, I graduated to Cinnabar, an Estee Lauder number that could floor a man at 100 paces. But not, alas, in a good way.

In my own defence, I must just point out that I never wore Poison, the weapon of chemical warfare most popular in the 1980s.

As I've got older I seem to have become more sensitive to the effects of perfume, and there are several that knock me sideways when I encounter them out there in the great wide world.

Naturally, I myself am a paragon of good taste, restricting myself to L'Eau D'Issey and Chanel No 5. Nobody could possibly object to them. Unless, of course, you've got something you want to tell me...

Updated: 08:48 Wednesday, March 29, 2006