Evocative Smells
More than any of my other senses, smells can conjure up a whole chunk of the past. My whole Dublin childhood is a history of smells.
The smell of pencil shavings, and new text books takes me right back to junior school.
The smell of the perfume ‘Poison’ is one of my mother’s do gooder friends, a right old interfering harridan who always shopped me to my parents. (Where I lived as a child everybody knew everybody else and gossiped, which is why I love the anonymity of London)
The smell of cowslips zooms me right pack to picnics with my parents when a very small child, in the pine forest area in the Dublin mountains where my father brewed smoky tea on a makeshift barbecue. No booze, just cups of tea with barbeque – makes me laugh now. The smell of fresh tar is school holidays; roses takes me back to white dresses at the local church May processions. The resiny smell of pine trees and the scent of lilies, that most popular of flower, always remind me of Irish wakes and funerals. And nicest of all, leather and horse manure - the local stables, and riding at my grandfather's farm. I can be walking along a London street and get a whiff of something that transports me back in time to 7 years old.
More than any of my other senses, smells can conjure up a whole chunk of the past. My whole Dublin childhood is a history of smells.
The smell of pencil shavings, and new text books takes me right back to junior school.
The smell of the perfume ‘Poison’ is one of my mother’s do gooder friends, a right old interfering harridan who always shopped me to my parents. (Where I lived as a child everybody knew everybody else and gossiped, which is why I love the anonymity of London)
The smell of cowslips zooms me right pack to picnics with my parents when a very small child, in the pine forest area in the Dublin mountains where my father brewed smoky tea on a makeshift barbecue. No booze, just cups of tea with barbeque – makes me laugh now. The smell of fresh tar is school holidays; roses takes me back to white dresses at the local church May processions. The resiny smell of pine trees and the scent of lilies, that most popular of flower, always remind me of Irish wakes and funerals. And nicest of all, leather and horse manure - the local stables, and riding at my grandfather's farm. I can be walking along a London street and get a whiff of something that transports me back in time to 7 years old.
posted by SheBah at 8:46 AM
14 Comments:
Never knew you were Irish, SB.
Horses, anything to do with horses and I'm up on a freezing cold morning trying to plait the mane on the hunter or lying flat on my back watching the clouds race across the sky while she puffs and blows around me, chomping and getting green spittle all over me as the slighty too big d-ring snaffe tinkles and the dogs find fresh cow pats to roll in and the scent of hawthorn and woodbine coat the air in a treacly almost sickly scent.
Certain washing up liquids remind me of when the first cat I ever loved died. I was so distraught I went into my room and smeared washing up liquid on the windows becauae, 'I didn't want to see the world anymore.' I think I was seven.
Floor polish remind me of boarding school. Ergo librarys. I love the smell of fresh laundry, reminds me of my first proper yet oh so dingy flat and the crazy laundrette around the corner that was warm and gave you free coffee while your clothes swrilled around.
Christ, I could go on, I am a very olfactory person. And damn you Beauty, now I want to go down the country and roll down a freshly lawned hill.
Goat cheese, eeeeugh, nasty devil's stuff. Smells foul, tates foul.
toasted almonds - aaah, now there's an aroma worth enshrining.
My ever fragrant wife - need I say more?
The smell of the top of my first niece's head, three days after she was born.
The smell of horse manure always reminds me of summer holidays at my granny's, which seems a bit strange to me now as she didn't have any horses.
None of this am very strange. You sense of smell AM the one sense that am the most closely linked with memory. It have to do with brain candy and all them chemical conversations that need to be done to make memory in first place. So little need to be done with smell, that it am easy for brain to relate new smells to old memories that it may have filed away based on smell.
Unfortunately me am what is called 'sent deaf.' It am kind of like what it am to be colour blind, but for the nose. Just as some people can only see black and white, or the entire rainbow except for one or two colours, sent deaf persons have limits to what they can smell. For me, only about 75% of all sent register on me nose. People say "Oh, smell this!" and me get nothing. But what me do like am honeysuckle. That am me childhood in the summer. Pencil shavings, childhood in winter. Diesel fuel, that am me first big money job as teenager. Pot smoke, University. Me ex-wife both when she was and was not wearing Opium perfume. Me could never smell the perfume on its own, but when she put it on it do something to her body smell... and it was great to begin with! The smell of me little hatchlings hair, about a day or so after she washes it, that am family.
Footsie, English dad, Irish mum -
born in Dublin but moved back here when still a kid, so am a bitzer.
FMC & monstee - woodbine, I remember wild woodbine (called Honeysuckle over here) - heavenly - and FMC do you remember devils candles?
Dr J MC - almonds, lovely, unless you hate marzipan.
Aunty Marianne & Monstee - babies and children have the most divine smells, especially if you nuzzle the nape of their neck!
Irish blood, English heart, This I'm made of
There is no one on earth I'm afraid of
Countries have smells. America and especially the department stores have an 'old carpet' type smell from the AC until you get used to it. It's still exciting.
Africa, the Mother Continent has a fantastic smell. It must be in the race memory or something, it is indescribable, but has the effect (on me) of ones mother's bare arm when we were small and tired and falling asleep.
Spain (and Holland and Germany to a lesser extent) smells of cigarillos. A great smell when you come off the plane and step into the blast furnace.
France has a lavanderish herby smell, sort of.
Italy has a sort of fishy/dusty/earthy smell.
I do indeed Miss Sexy. And those grasses with a kind of cobby head, me and my brother used to whip each other senseless with them.
My most unfortunate smell association is from when I was little my family would regularly visit a house on an island that had a long-drop. (An outside toilet which is just a huge hole in the ground with a toilet lid on the top.)
To disguise the smell they would place huge branches of rosemary all over the ground. It sort of mingled with the general poo smell and to this day I cant eat a lamb roast with rosemary without thinking of poo. Although it still does taste nice.
There is no smell more reminiscent to me of my Edwardian Pennine home than that of smoky mill-effluent and aniseed from the gobstopper factory. That and linament which I used copiously in a professional capacity.
I suppose Mr Jones, for you, other senses like smell are accentuated, being, you know, how can I put it, what's the PC thing these days?
Well any way, being as you are, I'll be blunt, being as you are, a footballer.
Not just countries that have smells but peoples too... I remember the smell of the asian family next door when I was a kid - not the house, but them. To small minded twats it was such a different smell that it had to be labelled as something bad but to me it was exotic and spicy. Now living in Asia I have become aware that westerners are perceived as smelling of meat and cheese - staple diets over here tend to involve more poultry and fish and very little by way of dairy products. I understood this, in theory, but it was only when I had a visitor staying from the UK that I really noticed it... and as my diet has changed so has my own aroma. And I have to say that the smell of my visitor (a very clean and hygenic individual, I must point out) was actually quite repulsive!
Binty - you may have something there - an African told me we smelt milky - I thought he was kidding! Can't still be true nowadays as Chicken Tikka Masala is now the English national dish!
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