How breathing Scottish air can apparently make you £25 richer (and poorer) – Scotsman comment

Take a deep breath. Now hold it. Keeping holding it for as long as you can.

Scottish air is being sold for £25 a bottle.

Depending on your lung capacity, you may be about £25 richer. However, when you eventually breathe out – and please do if you haven’t already – it’s gone, lost until the next deep breath.

Scottish air is now being sold by a shipping company which has already dispatched orders to presumably homesick ex-pats in Australia.

Far be it for us to question an apparently successful business model, but £25 a bottle does seem rather pricey for a fleeting experience of Scotland’s ‘smell’.

Air from the other Home Nations – England, Wales and Ireland – is also for sale along with the more specific ‘flavours’: fresh mist from Snowdonia, the aroma of fish and chips from Norfolk, and the evocative and powerful scent of the London Underground, which is apparently a best-seller but may also be the Marmite of bottled airs.

If there’s a market for that lot, there must be one for some of the wonderful brewery smells that float over parts of Scotland. And, while not wishing to denigrate the mists of Snowdonia, surely Scotch mist would attract a premium price, given its provenance.

We still remember the days when buying bottled water was considered unusual before Perrier led the charge across the Channel in the 1980s. But, perhaps we’ll all soon be getting aerated about the latest airs to hit the market or a recently discovered ‘vintage’ air laid down by some far-sighted Victorian entrepreneur dismissed as a lunatic by his peers.

However, by far the best air will always be the same: fresh, unpolluted and free.

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