WHEN that time during the dinner party comes round – usually when people have run out of the good stuff and start opening the bottles that you’ve brought – there’s often a Q-and-A session. These fun little interrogations can take many forms and they often reflect what kind of people the questioners are.

‘What superpower would you have?’ always comes from a fantasy/sci-fi fan who has watched series two of Heroes, even after the rubbish ending of the first one (my answer is always the same – the superpower of DIY).

‘If your wife/husband would let you, which famous person would you like to cop off with?’ is usually asked by someone whose first boyfriend/girlfriend is his/her husband/wife, which is why permission is sought in the question.

(For me, it would be Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West.)

And someone, usually the one who has finished off the can of Stella that everyone has been using as an ashtray all night, always asks: ‘If you had to lose a sense, which one would you lose?’

Most people pick the same one – except me.

Because there’s one I’ve never had.

I don’t know when or how I lost my sense of smell or even if I was born with one. According to my mother, they tried a forceps delivery which didn’t work and hours later, after a Caesarean section, out I came with a black and blue head.

So what has this deprivation meant over 42 years? What have I missed?

Growing up in St Saviour’s and then living near the moors, whenever someone took a huge sniff and said: ‘Ahhhh, smell that’, I’d say, ‘What is it?’.

‘Freshly-scattered cow muck. What a great smell.’

This little appreciation of bucolic heaven usually walks hand in hand with ‘Oh, God, there it is – the smell of summer’.

‘What is it?’

‘Freshly cut grass.’

For urbanites getting a whiff of the city, it’s always, ‘Wow, I love that smell.’

‘What is it?’

‘Just-laid road tar.’

The ‘What-is-its?’ represent what I’ve said a thousand times. Because no matter how often you tell people that you haven’t got a sense of smell, they always forget.

Do you think Stevie Wonder’s mates used to say, ‘Hey, Stevland, don’t fancy yours much?’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, sorry, man. I forgot.’

So people forget you’re bereft of the sense of smell and at dinner parties it’s the first one people choose to lose.

Why is that? Is it because it’s not a very serious sense? Because it’s not obvious when you don’t have it? You can still drive, listen to music, paint, taste and feel Ms Claudia Cardinale’s hair on the pillow next to yours (in your dreams). The only thing you can’t do is smell.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that your smelling faculty is on a par with sight or hearing, but it can be dangerous if you don’t have it.

One night, years ago, a mate and his girlfriend invited me round for Sunday dinner. The table was set, the joint cooked happily in the oven and my mate nipped off down the street to his dad’s house for some homebrew (we used to do things like that in the early 80s) while his girlfriend and I rabbited away in the living room.

Twenty minutes later we heard the door bang open and my mate shouting expletives.

The kitchen was a haze of smoke. The joint was burnt.

‘Didn’t you smell owt?’ he asked me.

‘I haven’t got a sense of smell,’ I protested.

‘Neither have I,’ said his girlfriend.

‘Unbe-bloody-lievable,’ said my mate. ‘Two people who can’t smell a thing left in charge of a cooker full of meat.’

The roast spuds were salvageable, though, and the

homebrew was great.

But what might have happened if he’d turned up 10 or 20 minutes later? The house might’ve gone up.

Not being able to smell has garnered some strange reactions over the years.

Some people don’t believe me, a lot think I’m being weird and one friend even thought I was being a poseur – what’s supposedly cool about not being able to smell?

Almost everybody says, ‘But that means you can’t taste either. Because taste and smell are connected’.

I’ve always thought that I have a pretty good sense of taste. You often hear of people losing one sense and this makes one or more of the others even sharper.

For those who say my taste is impaired, I say: if a vindaloo curry is any more tongue-numbingly hot or peach schnapps any more stomach-churningly vomitous than I think they are, then they are completely inedible and undrinkable.

I’ve always wanted to do a couple of social experiments on people’s tolerance towards sensory impairment.

The first would be to break a couple of stink bombs inside my clothing in a busy shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon.

I would do it in the most densely populated areas, then wait for people’s comments and reactions.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a sense of smell,’ will be my defence.

It would be interesting to see if those security guards that dress like American cops come and escort me to the revolving exit.

Another would be to book a table at a really highfalutin’ restaurant and walk in wearing an unfeasibly large hearing aid.

I would then proceed to order all the most expensive stuff and eat it extremely noisily, chomping, slurping and humming while chewing.

It would be interesting to see if any other diner said anything or if I was asked to leave.

One of my mates said to another when the barman of the Snooty Fox called him a ‘Cockney-something-unprintable’: ‘Don’t get barred, Graham.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s just one less pub to drink in.’

And I sort of think that having no sense of smell is just one fewer with which to enjoy myself.

But do I miss it? Have I felt left out because I don’t have a full complement of senses? Would I be a completely different person if I could smell?

I’ve never heard Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. I’ve never tasted a freshly sliced kumquat (that’s if you can slice them – not only have I not tasted one, I’ve never seen one, either).

I’ve never seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

I’ve never felt the rain in a tropical rainforest wash the sweat from my face. And I will probably never do any of those things.

So what does it really matter if I never get to smell Claudia Cardinale’s scent as we dance languidly on a Riviera balcony or, more likely, take in the full fallout as Big Al lets one go in a hospital service lift.

For me, at least, four out of five really ain’t that bad.