SMELL SMELL

By Sue Wighton

Do you smell? How do you smell? How often do you smell? We take our sense of smell for granted. But it’s a sense that could use a bit more of a profile. After all, if we didn’t smell we couldn’t taste, or navigate the world around us.

Just take a moment to think of your favourite foods – how that first waft of warm toast in the morning carries so much with it. This smell of toast always makes me think of my childhood, the love of my parents, and a feeling of safety and warmth. It’s the optimistic aroma of a new day, a fresh start.

We can thank our Italian and Greek friends for the robust smell of garlic and its promise of something delicious to come! And of course, we all know the trick of simply cooking onions, and how this smell is guaranteed to start the tastebuds going, regardless of the recipe.

Smells can transport us back to another time and place. I remember my first day of prac. teaching when I was at Teacher’s College. It brought back that unique smell of my old primary school (yours too, I imagine) … the odour of children's sweat and old bananas in musty ‘globite’ school bags. I should have listened to my sense of smell back then (can you listen to smells? I think you can). Should have run for the hills. Instead, I inflicted myself on the innocent owners of those smelly globite bags for years. Thanks to me, there’s a cohort of folks out there who still can’t do long division!

Only recently I smelled a hand cream that was exactly like the Herco lotion my mum used to buy. Green container. Herco Olivol. I can smell it still. I cried.

There are some smells that make us recoil in horror … nature’s way of telling us to beware. Sour milk. Maggoty bins. Cat poo. Oysters. (Maybe that last one is just me.) I was brought up not to mention smells. In my middle-class childhood, it was considered impolite. And naturally (or not) we all want to present our more fragrant selves to the world. But in life, let’s face it, stuff pongs – sweet, not so sweet, and sometimes, downright rank. Our noses allow us to experience a complete range of scents, which remind us of our animal beginnings. Maybe that’s why we’re all a bit squeamish about this much-neglected sense.

Our sense of smell helps us choose a partner, or a meal, as well as a manufactured fragrance to apply to our clean bodies. Hey …we’re all aware that not only does sex sell, but it also smells. It’s an earthy, evocative, salty smell. Is this the smell of those pheromones I’ve read about?

What are your favourite smells? I love the smell of the ocean, old books and new-mown grass.

One of my all-time favourite words describes the smell of approaching rain … ‘petrichor’. What a wonderful word! And the fact that someone thought to give it a name.

This gets me thinking … what word could describe that delicious, yeasty smell of morning toast? Perhaps to borrow from the German? I’m thinking ‘kuchenbrotiness’. And the smell of the ocean? How about ‘aquaphescence’? Old books? ‘Mustiamour’!

Helen Keller – the famous blind and deaf author and educator – is quoted as saying, ‘Smell is a potent wizard’. You can smell that again!