Sitting in the morning sun, reading Robert Hilburn’s brilliant biography of Paul Simon, The Life, a heavenly smell wafts past. It is the smell of frying eggs and then bacon. It is just about resistible, the need to keep shedding pounds just about seeing off the desire for high fat comfort food. In the end, it is not a close run thing but nonetheless if someone presented me with a full English here and now I’d devour it pretty well instantly. Thankfully, no one does.
I take for granted the various senses I enjoy, the sense of smell being high on the list. And it’s often fried things that smell the best. Nothing, apart from fried eggs and bacon, comes close to the smell of frying onions. Similar with freshly deep fried Cod and Chips, which when cooked properly invites the diner to devour vast portions, despite one feeling completely stuffed long before the end. But it’s not just food, particularly the fried variety, is it?
One of my favourite smells was at the Speedway, a sport once popular at Bristol’s Eastville Stadium on a Friday night. The castor oil based engine oil would envelop the stadium and the areas around it, too. Mixed with the scents of rubber, exhaust and stadium food, I often wondered if I actually went more for the smells that the sport itself. And there’s the smell of a diesel locomotive passing by on the railway, visible as ‘clag’ as the anorak trainspotters will call it. Right up the top of the list for me is aviation fuel.
I very much doubt that inhaling these various smells does your lungs much good but I cannot think of a more enticing one than that emitted by jet aircraft. In the days when our annual holiday was spent in the Greek island of Corfu, the hot scent of aviation fuel combined with the local foliage always indicated that we had arrived. The aircraft door would open and in it would seep.
I do feel grateful for the sense of smell, not least because I know of people who have none. During my job with a well-known brain-injury charity, I worked with people who, usually as a result of accidents, had permanently lost various senses, including both smell and taste. It was only then I realised the implications. On occasion, they would consume food or drink – milk being a prime example – which had gone out of date and gave out a terrible stench and they had no clue. It looked okay but of course it wasn’t and people around them would say, “You’re not drinking that, are you?” leaving them absolutely baffled. “Why not?”
Then, there’s the book shop, or even the brief sensation when a freshly-printed book arrives in the post. It’s one reason I cannot countenance the idea of e-readers, Kindles and the like, or buying second-hand books which are more likely to retain the scent of the last person who read it rather than the book itself. And what if they were the type of people who didn’t wash their hands after a visit to the bathroom? I’d be on the hand sanitiser all the time.
We visited a vineyard last week for a guided tour, followed by a tasting. We were invited to breathe the wine in and tell the host what we could smell. I was so bad at it. Some people could smell strawberries and cream from one wine, which to be fair I kind of got, but only after someone had said it out loud, and with other wines there were scents of lemon, grapefruit and fresh apples. I was far too embarrassed to say that all I could smell was grapes, but to be fair they did smell amazing.
I worried during Covid that I might lose my sense of smell, if not permanently then at least temporarily because it certainly happened with a lot of people. Indeed, one old friend swears that after one particularly powerful attack by the virus it took the best part of a year to regain the sense of smell and taste, but it returned to a far lesser degree than it was before.
My green-fingered partner has introduced me to the myriad scents of nature through the wide variety of plant life she has curated over the years and that, in turn, has encouraged me to think more about utilising the sense of smell which previously I had barely thought about.
I’m off back to the sun now to smell whatever smells will follow the fried eggs and bacon. If I come across anything better today, I’ll be amazed.
