Smell! What does it mean?
I’ve received a small plastic cube containing ‘Confidence’. I’m jolly pleased with it. It’s a positive smell, slightly sweet in the way that certain men’s aftershave is. Slightly pine, in the way that toilet cleaner isn’t. It does make you feel upbeat the way major chords do.
I also received ‘Hawthorn Blossom’, but this is more tricky because we’re not after an emotion but a memory. The memory of a giant Hawthorn tree in which I spend a pleasant spring day with my friends.
‘Hawthorn Blossom’ smells close, it smells familiar but it doesn’t hit the memory. Not in the way that the actual smell when you walk past a tree in bloom lifts you mentally back into the branches.
I’ve ordered from the same supplier the following; carbolic soap, pencil shavings (we all know where that will lead) old style hospital, which is perhaps more correctly the smell of public health buildings in the late 60′s early 70′s (for me) the mixture of linoleum and disinfectants.
And that was a smell I came across again just yesterday, cimbing the stairs in an ex-school building, exposed to the weak heat of March sun, it took me right back to matriculation queues at college.
Mmmm.
