Two years ago, there was an attempted burglary at my house in South London. I don’t own a television or any related paraphernalia, and I’d cunningly left a bunch of useless, old keys obviously visible in the back room – almost like a decoy – so the thieves didn’t manage to steal anything. In fact I gained from the crime, to the tune of one bright orange human turd, left for me on the garden path outside the kitchen.

The police explained that thieves are often very excited immediately prior to breaking into a property, and that this excitement can cause them to need to void bowel at very short notice. So, if you live in an area with a heightened risk of crime against property, it might well be worth your while investing in a child’s potty and a roll of toilet paper for your back garden. And, if you really want to reduce your risk of being severely inconvenieced by burglary, I would further suggest having no cash and owning only a small amount of unattractive possessions.

The police finger-printed the house, but apparently you can’t dust a turd, nor do they contain any of their producer’s DNA. I suggested that the colour of the item bespoke an unusual if not unique approach to food, a bowel significantly out of balance, and that they might be able to narrow the field of suspicion by looking at supermarket till receipts in the area and picking up anyone who obviously survives on a diet of tomato soup and Wotsits.  They left me to clean up with a plastic bag.

Happily, the break-in happened in winter, and the faeces froze solid in the cold of the night. I imagine that the biochemistry was not unlike that of Bird’s Ice Magic ice cream topping.

I’ve often wondered why human beings are so obsessed with hygeine, and why we replace our own, unique scent with the generic, categorised smells of aftershave, cologne, perfume, body spray, anti-perspirant. Meanwhile, most mammals live in a fug of their own excretion-funk, marking territory with their bodily waste. But for a smell to claim a territory, we need to link the odour to its owner. So I’ve come to the conclusion that in ancient times people recognised, and reacted strongly to each other by smell as well as by sight. Knowing whose manor you were on was very important, and – especially in the days when everyone lived on a diet of diseased mammoth and raw fish – you’d very likely smell the locals before you saw them.

People find the smell of stale urine on public transport strongly offensive – I’ve seen the looks on their faces, week in week out, for years. Is that because, subconsciously, they interpret the stench as a territorial claim? As though they’re in an area very much owned by a very specific person, someone they don’t know? Perhaps if we cover up and flush away all our natural odours, that makes it easier for us to move around crowded public places without clashing over the territory. Perhaps we feel less threatened when the people we have to brush past in corridors smell vaguely of sugary flowers, rather than of themselves.

I spoke to my local Crime Prevention Officer, but he hinted that the Police might not enjoy collecting samples of faecal solids from kids they stop in the street as much as they enjoy collecting swabs of saliva, which is a shame, as their current policy of stop and search on the grounds that they’re investigating terrorism is so obviously taking the fucking piss.