There’s more to an old perfume bottle than the scent of nostalgia

After a decade of the modish but dementing form of semi-detached co-habitation known as Living Apart Together (LAT), my partner and I recently decided to move under the same roof.

In theory, LAT may channel the bohemian vibe of Jean-paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In practice, it means your favourite cookbook/pair of shoes/omelette pan is invariably in the other house.

So, Ho! for the merging of our households, and a savage cull of stuff not wanted on the voyage into our joint future. Our benchmark would be the earnest maxim of William Morris: there would be nothing in our new home that was not useful or beautiful.

A month into the move, there are signs that our definitions of beauty and utility may not be in complete agreement. Objects destined for the charity shop or the tip seem unaccountably to have hitched a ride in the removal van. Lurking in an obscure corner, I discovered the hideous electric piano that we had definitely agreed to get rid of.

My reproaches would be more vociferous if I hadn’t a guilty secret of my own: half-a-dozen empty scent bottles; L’heure Bleue, Après L’ondée, Bal à Versailles, Arpège. Of course they should have gone out with the rest of the rubbish. What kind of person keeps empty scent bottles? The sort of person, I would have said until recently, for whom the faint echo of a fragrance fills an empty scent bottle with memories.

But now I know better, for a Sunday newspaper reported a thriving internet market in the empty packaging of high-end goods: Chanel paper carrier bags (a collection of 17 recently sold for £265); boxes from Louis Vuitton and Tiffany (average prices of £74 and £51 respectively) and – yes! – empty scent bottles: £47 apiece for fragrance by Yves Saint Laurent.

The rationale behind such purchases is apparently the longing of people without celebrity incomes to emulate social media posts, by celebs such as the Kardashians, of themselves surrounded by luxury shopping bags.

In my salad days, every spare penny of my tiny salary was spent on advanced frivolity, mostly at end-of-season sales. Failing to anticipate its future value as a social media prop, I threw out of much of the fancy packaging. But a surprising quantity has resurfaced during our move.

Never mind nostalgia: it looks as though the reckless spending habits of my youth may fund the comforts of my middle age.

A Yougov poll reports that the wicked activities of scammers are a growing menace, particularly for the over65s, 31 per cent of whom reported being contacted by fraudsters on a daily basis.

Among them is one of my own elderly relations, a lively 90-year-old who regularly answers the phone to well-spoken young people who warn her that her online banking has been compromised, and urge her to transfer her funds to a new account.

With her usual implacable good manners, my relation implores these people not to be anxious on her behalf: she has no online account. Her modest banking needs are conducted via that critically endangered species: a real, live bank manager in a bricks-andmortar high street bank.

It is a gentle, analogue resistance to cruel online shysters – and all the sweeter for that.