RIP BO. By Candida Crewe

Harriet Dart, Britain’s number-four tennis player, recently asked an official to tell her French opponent,

Lois Boisson, to put on some deodorant. ‘She smells really bad,’ Dart said.

Her words caused something of a stink.

The incident made me think: when did BO disappear in civilian life? You barely smell it anywhere these days.

At my school, one girl’s BO was so notorious I can still remember her name 45 years on, though I have never seen or heard of her since. I blanche with shame at how bitchy we were about the overwhelming stink. No one wanted to be in her class or dorm. She had no friends.

BO was brutal back then, for the sufferer and for those around. A friend told me BO was a huge thing at his public school. Cold communal showers and predatory beaks didn’t encourage prevention. My peers have only to say ‘BO’ and we instantly regress and giggle at the awful memory.

I say memory because, somewhere along the line, BO, like the dodo, became extinct. When did you last smell it, except on the Central Line in high summer? Around 1998, maybe?

I have three sons in their twenties. My boyfriend says my house occasionally has a ‘definitely masculine’ air. In their teens my sons stank of feet, weed and boy – though never BO for long. Their pits smelt after exercise, but then only for seconds before they hotfooted it into the shower, where they remained for perplexing lengths of time.

Their friends were barely dressed (braless girls in skimpy vests; topless boys, in shorts only). None of them smelt.

When I was their age, showers existed but were not ubiquitous. Now, even indifferent Airbnbs have – dread phrase – wet rooms, equipped with quasi-fire hydrants.

In the eighties, the bath still reigned. Some fastidious types had one every day, but by no means everyone. I didn’t.

Back then, even just twice a week was normal, with no shame attached.

Remember Jerry Hall saying Mick liked her unwashed.

Was it a postwar austerity mentality that Boomers inherited? I was born in 1964 but laughed along with my parents at Americans with their poncy washy ways.

Now it is shocking to hear people admitting they don’t wash every day. I have a bath four times a year, but not a day goes by – ever – without my having a shower, and occasionally two.

When my (now ex-) husband and I bought a good-size terraced house in London in 1997, we had one bathroom. It didn’t occur to us to put in a shower. Roll-top baths were the thing. But they take a while to fill – so they definitely weren’t a daily thing.

Roll on 30 years and the thought of living somewhere without a shower right next to my bedroom is pathetically uncomfortable.

When did I get to be so precious?

It was around 2000, when showers eclipsed baths. Showers save water and are quicker and easier. They were boosted by the increase in global temperatures and tempting shower gels, rather than just Imperial Leather.

I began running every day and didn’t want single-handedly to make BO fashionable again. The attitude of my children’s generation that daily washing is de rigueur was taking over. And when I hit 50, there was the dread of turning into a stinking old woman.

Some contemporaries – the last bastions against this modern hygiene obsession – speak darkly and in hushed, nervous tones of going for days without washing. One woman friend says that when she does wash, she never uses soap.

Below 50, the everyday shower is non- negotiable. Above 50, washing is a much looser notion, even if not washing has become something of a dirty little secret.

One friend, 54, has a definite whiff about him. Neither he nor his wife is domestically inclined. So their washing kit and washing machine see little action. His adult children are petrified he is turning into a stinky old man.

It’s also because the couple’s daughter is in the shower for 20 minutes, minimum, every day, in their remote cottage.

She has priority and steps out of it only when there is literally no water left, hot or cold – for her or anyone else. How old is she? Eleven, FFS. But she’s The Future. When we in our sixties die out, BO will go to the grave with us – and, I dare say, the elderly will smell of pee.

Younger ones will wash twice a day (or more) as standard, as long as our water supplies hold out under the strain. With their OCD levels of ‘personal care’, the under-50s have eradicated the traditional stench of the underarm in their generation.

BO is over, just as surely as crabs were toast the moment millennials started dispensing with their pubes.