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FARTING This is all about farting so, as they say on the TV News before revealing the result of a football match they are going to show later, if you don't want to see it you should look away now; although it is difficult to see how anyone can be offended by farting as it is only a natural bodily function that we all do at some time or other and the word itself is now common parlance. Even in the newspapers you see farting written in full nowadays, whereas a few years ago it was always represented as f******. However the reason for this may well be that f****** is also used to represent the word 'fucking', and it was sometimes difficult for the reader to know which of the two words the writer was referring to, farting or fucking, especially if the article was about say Russell Crowe or Liam Gallagher, who could quite easily be doing either, possibly at the same time.      That said, I hope you are all still with me, not least because one or more of you may be able to shed a little light on something that has always puzzled me. And it is this. Why is it, when two people have eaten exactly the same things, that their farts don't smell the same? For this is the case; I've noticed it on numerous occasions. And because as you get older you tend to fart more frequently (old people are not referred to as old farts for nothing), the older I have become the more I have noticed it, and noted the veracity of it. Take yesterday as a case in point. The Trouble and I, as is quite usual, ate exactly the same things all day. For breakfast we had boiled eggs (incidentally, always great fart fodder) and toast, for lunch we had some potato and leek soup I'd knocked up and some fruit and yoghurt, and in the evening we had sausage and mash with vegetables. We even drank the same, coffee at breakfast, tea at lunch and throughout the day, red wine with the sausage and mash. So by breakfast-time this morning over the last twenty four hours we had eaten and drank exactly the same. Now if you are anything like The Trouble and me, and particularly if you have had sweet and sour pork and beef in black bean sauce the night before, you are not long into the new day before your first fart. The Trouble was the first to metamorphose shit into sound and I followed very soon after. The smell of The Trouble's fart was so disgusting you could almost see the kitchen door recoil in fear of its paint being stripped, an aroma that can only be likened to a fusion of methane gas and gorgonzola cheese, a stench so overpowering that if it had emanated from the behind of Saddam Hussein there is no doubt it would have been classified as a weapon of mass destruction. Whereas my fart was quite sweet-smelling. Oddly enough when I mentioned this to The Trouble she said that she found exactly the reverse to be true, but then she wasn't standing where I was standing. An enigma indeed, and one of which I would love to know the answer.