Following a conversation over lunch with her colleagues, the girl asked me the other night what my favourite smells were.I consider scent to be one of the most under-rated senses -- you might consider not being able to live without hearing, or a life lived without sight, but rarely is a thought given to our sense of smell. Which is funny, because it reportedly has the strongest link to memory recall.
I remember the time I spent in New York -- ten years ago this year, as it happens -- and how I later came to think of Manhatten as a city of smells. I had a theory that you could navigate the city blind, going only by the unique smells individual blocks or streets had. One street always had a guy selling roasted chestnuts, another place smelled like blocked drains, somewhere else might have smelled like fresh bread, yet another of steam from the subway. I wonder now what I might remember from those days and nights, if I was just given the smells -- if the jazz club in an underground disused meat locker might have had a particular smell of sweat and candles, or what the sheets in the hostel smelled like.
I struggle to name five of my favourite smells, without resorting to cliche -- like the smell of fresh baked bread, or newly-mown grass. But even those have strong memories attached to them, of walking past the supermarket every morning on the way to school, and on cold, frosty mornings feeling warmed by the smell of bread as it came out the vents of the shop's bakery. Or summer Saturday afternoons when the grass had been cut...
It's strange in a way how we can't smell ourselves. I know that I must have a distinct smell, the combination of my deodorant and aftershave mixed with whatever makes me smell like myself, but I wouldn't recognise it. I'm always slightly surprised when someobody notices my aftershave, comments on it, or even can name it.
I came across a smell earlier I had forgotten about, and forgotten the memories of. As I poured what was left of a forgotten glass of beer down the sink, it foamed up around the plughole, and I smiled as I remembered weekends when my Dad would pull the sofa in front of the tv to watch West Ham play football -- and the big glass mugs of beer he would have. Sometimes as a kid he would let me take a sip, or I would just smell it and get the foam on my nose. In years to come, what smells will remind me of here, and now?
And as ever, I turn it over to whoever may be reading -- what are your favourite smells? And what stories do they tell? Do you ever smell something and recall something you didn't even realise you had forgotten? Tell me everything.
