Living by the sea it’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with our commonest (and noisiest) neighbours, the herring gulls. Hate when you’ve just hung a white sheet out on the line and they crap all over it, or somehow hover en masse above your car to cover it generously from top to bottom in their paint-stripping excrement. Hate when their dawn chorus wakes you up at 5am with a massed screeching that could rouse the dead. Hate the idiots who persist in feeding them, even though they’re easily the most successful scavengers around and there are far too many of them already.

But at the same time they’ve got as much character as Cockney cab drivers and they’re fascinating to watch. Fix one with a stare and it responds with a shifty look, as if it just happened to be passing and wasn’t up to anything, honest Guv. Living in such close proximity to them offers a rare chance to observe them up close right through the year, to learn a bit of their language and to enjoy some of their odder quirks – like staring thoughtfully at their own feet for minutes at a time. They make excellent weather-vanes too if you’re not sure of the wind direction.

It’s mating season right now, and the air is filled with the distracting, and rather revolting sound of seagulls shagging, the male balancing on top of the female (often on a chimney top) and flapping his wings while uttering an all too distinctive series of squawks that can be heard for streets around – talk about exhibitionism. In a few weeks, of course, we’ll have the chicks (two to three to a nest, many of which die in the first few weeks, usually by falling off roofs), and their incessant, night and day squeaking is going to be driving us mad till they finally learn to fly in mid summer. And that’s another story entirely.

What a highly collectible perfume by a fairly obscure, high-end brand was doing in the Weymouth branch of T.K.Maxx I have no idea, but there it was, ours for the princely sum of £16.99 (recommended retail price €135).

Created by the much-admired perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena (now the in-house perfumer for Hermès) for the company he founded in 2000, Osmanthus gets an admiring review in the even more widely admired Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, and you can see why.

It’s a gentle, sweet but subtle scent, whose plush peachy centre is reminiscent of Guerlain’s timeless Mitsouko, though it seems to lack either Mitsouko’s strength of character or its mysterious staying-power. Yet Osmanthus has magic of its own, and its apparent evanescence on the skin proves something of a disappearing trick – for after putting a little on the back of my hand and noting that it didn’t seem to last very long, what should happen but that an hour or two later, as if from nowhere, its fresh, fruity scent would suddenly snap into focus again, almost as strong as when I first sprayed it on.

I’ve no idea how it’s done, or even whether the effect was intentional, but my guess is that it’s got something to do with the way Osmanthus’ peachiness bonds with the perfume’s other elements, some of which are a little surprising, like castoreum, a resinous compound extracted from beavers that has a leathery, animalic smell and is also found in Chanel’s wonderful Cuir de Russie.

Natural osmanthus, incidentally, is an attractive evergreen shrub which, in sheltered conditions, will grow to the size of a small tree. It grows wild in the Himalayas, China and Japan and was first introduced to European gardens in 1771, where it became known as Sweet Tea or Fragrant Olive. In the autumn it bears thousands of small but intensely fragrant white flowers, whose intoxicatingly sweet scent gives the plant its botanical name, Osmanthus fragrans.

Its fragrance, indeed, is remarkably powerful, as we discovered on an autumn visit to the enchanted garden of Brécy, near Bayeux (above). From the massively stepped levels of the formal gardens, which form a kind of vast single staircase up towards the Normandy sky, we recognised osmanthus’ heady scent a long time before we finally located its source, from a couple of dark columnar trees planted close against the south wall of the church, outside the gardens themselves.

Despite the sheer intensity of its fragrance, this is one of the only powerfully sweet scents I know that one can never smell enough (unlike, say, Madonna lilies, whose scent becomes overwhelming after a while): there’s a fresh lemony edge to osmanthus that makes it refreshing and intoxicating all at once. Enjoy Jean-Claude Ellena’s perfume by all means, but plant the tree wherever you can.

Watching them being swept further and further out, with little chance of being able to swim their way through the hundred feet of dragging white water between them and the beach, it began to look as if we were going to have to watch them drown; people were already running along the beach and watching from the streets above; reaching into my pocket I realised I hadn’t even got my mobile, but then a police car raced up to the top of the breakwater and policemen in high-visibility vests were running down to the huddle of people on the beach.

Long minutes while nothing seemed to happen, and only one swimmer’s head could still be seen, going under then coming up again and sometimes waving an arm; and then finally here came the cavalry, as the coastguard helicopter reared up from behind the beach, swung round overhead while everyone below gestured out into the waves where the swimmer was, then in a matter of a minute it was hovering overhead, winching down the paramedic, who seemed to take only a few seconds to pluck the bedraggled swimmer out of the churning sea.

And off they went, leaving the beach clustered with onlookers and, amazingly, the second swimmer, who had somehow battled his way back through the surf and the exploding waves, to huddle together with his chastened, helpless friends.

It’s funny that death isn’t more integrated into our lives today, since it’s just as integral to life as, say, giving birth – except of course one is intensely sad and the other, on the whole, is something to celebrate. Yet we celebrate death, too, in a way, by remembering the life of the person we’ve lost.

In the city I could happily wear one perfume in the morning and another one at night, but down here in deepest Dorset on my almost-island I can go all week without spraying on a single scent.

It’s not that I love perfume any less, but rather that, when you come to think of it, perfume is at its heart a social pleasure, best shared with other people, like food and wine. Smelling perfume on one’s own is a bit like eating a gourmet meal or drinking a bottle of vintage wine alone – still a pleasure, certainly, but one diminished by the lack of anyone to share it with.

Even worse, in perfume’s case, its pleasure is diminished yet further by the fact that, after a short while, your nose becomes so accustomed to the scent you’re wearing that it’s often hard to smell it on yourself at all, though other people, hours later, will often catch a drift of it and ask you what it is.

Solitary pleasures have their place, of course, and sometimes when I go to bed at night I spray a favourite perfume on to savour as I drift to sleep, but all the same it’s slightly sad to think that such a pleasurable pursuit has, like fashion, no real place outside the crowded social setting of a city or a town.

On days like these I’m thankful for our foot-thick Portland-stone walls, which must have witnessed many gales far worse than this, such as the Great Gale of November 1824 (more colourfully known as The Outrage) which breached Chesil Beach, drowned 25 islanders, swept away the old ferry across the Fleet and even, a mile or two inland, blew a farmer’s turnips clean out of the ground.