My wife, a mild asthmatic who sneezes for an hour if she puts on a coat she hasn't worn for a month, was turning green and sweating slightly as I thrust open the windows and admitted the stiff Wellington breeze.
"Perhaps it will clear," I said a few minutes later over coffee on Lambton Quay. But I wasn't kidding anyone. There was nothing for it but to book into another hotel and wave goodbye to one night's worth of the apartment's not-inconsiderable tariff.
"Oooh, I know!" the woman at reception said in a wide-eyed tone as I told her why we were leaving. "My mother won't even come in the building."
It occurred to me that she might do something about it, particularly since she used the proprietorial "we" to explain that she'd only recently taken over the place. But I resisted the urge to tell her she was a cretin, shouldered my bag and left.
Much is made of smoke-free hotel rooms these days. Leaving the olfactory evidence of a late-night cigar is virtually a criminal offence. But the whiff left by a nice Romeo y Julieta is as nothing compared with the noxious odour of something cooked up by industrial chemists and bottled by the gallon.
It's something the hospitality industry might like to bear in mind. If they can set aside some rooms as "non-smoking", perhaps they might like to take it one step further: "Would sir prefer a standard room, or one in which chemical warfare has recently been waged?"