As a wine taster, I used to think that smell was the most neglected of our senses. But in our society touch is even more so. In the 1960s, Sidney Jourard, a psychologist at the University of Florida, observed the behaviour of couples in coffee shops around the world. He found that, in the space of an hour, couples in Puerto Rico touched each other 180 times. This compared to 110 times in Paris, just twice in Florida, and not at all in London. Jourard also found that French parents and their children touched three times more than their American counterparts.
