The truth about scent memory

Strong pongs and time travel.

I can smell this advert.

I’m not quite sure how to put this, but the top of the staircase in my flat smells like Grandma. Not Grandma herself, always fragrant, a faint hint of powder from her proffered cheek, or lipstick, or a recently extinguished B&H as we kissed goodbye. It’s her house. Upstairs. The top of her own stairs perhaps. I can only ever smell it for a fleeting moment, just as I leap up the last two steps. The warm scent of carpet, vague traces of cologne, the spice of some pot pourri, and tobacco.

It’s both comforting and disorienting to be yanked so suddenly into a time this version of me doesn’t belong. With that smell in my nostrils, I should be smaller, gingerly taking the steps one at a time – or tumbling down them, a regular occurrence – clinging to the bannister as I descend, or risking rising on tiptoe to peek out of the house’s side window, to gaze at the cricket field beyond. It’s just a smell, atoms arranging themselves in a familiar formation, and yet it’s like finding pages of an old diary.

It took me ages to work out why I could smell it right there, and nowhere else, and so briefly. I didn’t suspect visitations or brain injuries (okay so I googled for, like, ten seconds) but the lack of explanation bugged me. And then: there is a chest of drawers in my bedroom that once lived in one of Grandma’s bedrooms. It’s not an heirloom or anything, just old, the kind of outmoded stuff you see up-cycled in junk shops. I’ve had it twenty years or so, but have yet to gentrify it with a slicking of Farrow & Ball – it remains as it was when I was small, coated in dark, unfashionable, slightly flaking varnish. Its handles warrant no commotion and its only ornamental quirk is a substantially raised edge at the rear to stop things falling down the back of it. Upon it is whatever I can’t be bothered to file away anywhere else and inside it are my socks and pyjamas.

The drawer liners, I often forget until I see them, are old sections of unused wallpaper: embossed, ersatz tiles in quintessentially eighties florals originally destined for Grandma’s kitchen wall. Perhaps I should treat such an artefact more reverently but I’ve always thought the most honourable method of preservation comes from being useful to more than one generation. So, the smell must come from there. Or perhaps it doesn’t. I can’t smell it in the bedroom, ever, only the top of the stairs. Either way, science and the supernatural have combined to give me an olfactory memory boost every time I change floors.

I’ve always been sensitive to smell. After one bout of covid, I could smell people’s dirty hair from a thousand paces. Everywhere I went, the reek of dandruff, built-up product, heat damage and grease. I would have to change seats on the Tube, or back away from pedestrian crossings until out of the radiation zone. It was the strangest thing – and a disastrous anecdote in company, making everyone self-conscious about their personal hygiene – and then, suddenly, after about a year, maybe more, it was gone. Bad hair days abounded, but my nose was on strike. I’ve never been so relieved to encounter sensory deprivation.

Another staircase, in a pub somewhere – I made a note in my phone but can’t recall where and when – smells like a block of flats I used to visit as a child. Another grandma, this time the next door neighbour’s, who was kind and always had biscuits. The smell is of cooking, not unusual in itself, but very eighties cooking. Square meals in shades of beige with boiled, bleached-out veg, slowly bronzing pie crusts on Gas Mark 5, chips fresh out of the basket cooling between two plates, slowly decrisping (not a word). I’m taken aback by it every time, remembering later visits to the same block as a teenager, delivering papers, remarking even then how everything had changed – the flats were once home to old folk but now housed mixed generations. The dinners were different but the smell had already taken hold, become part of the fabric of the building.

Fragrance, obviously, is a huge sensory anchor. Recently, I was writing about a particular New Year’s Eve and realised I’d have been wearing the mighty Diesel Plus Plus and, honestly, I could smell it there and then. Sweet and exotic. I’ve no idea what was in it, but people always commented on it (positively, btw). It became hard to find and my tastes eventually leaned more adventurous and aspirational – Diesel Plus Plus retailed for about £22 in the 1990s, to my amazement it still seems to be available – so I switched to more grownup scents, but it was my signature for many years.

Loved it at the time but I NEVER want to smell this ever again.

I’m astounded people still actively wear CK One, a fragrance I could pick out of a lineup of 10 million others. It launched just as my second-year grant cheque landed in my lap, so I bought a tiny 50ml bottle and felt like a monarch for however long it lasted. I often catch a whiff out and about, and to see it enduring thirty years on feels like madness, but I suppose there will always be eighteen-year-olds, and a thirst for retro – perhaps they’re wearing it ironically, like when trucker caps came back and everyone looked like 1970s Castro serial killers. That my body cringes head to toe with a flood of memories about the boy who splashed Calvin’s citrusy toilet disinfectant all over is irrelevant to the hordes wearing it now. Similarly, Davidoff Cool Water will for ever be the accompanying smell to throwing up in a plant pot at the first year summer ball, or begging for an extension on my essay on francophone Belgium.

When I was single, in 2010, and about to start The Guyliner blog, I lived above a Subway sandwich shop. Every so often, the smell of its oversweetened, dusty, cakey bread would drift through my windows. Depending on where I was emotionally at the time, it would either bolster me (at least I’m not eating a Subway right now) or depress me (f•ck’s sake I live above a Subway in a flat the size of a paperback). Whenever I smell it now I’m taken back to scorching summers, bare feet on cheap laminate flooring, traffic roaring by outside, and a room temperature somewhere between ‘solar flare’ and ‘high season at the smelting plant’ thanks to zero insulation.

It works both ways. I discovered I too elicit scent memories in others. Friends have recognised a scent I wear, or told me something smelled like me – usually a scarf or something rather, than the elephant house at the zoo, just to be clear. There are few greater compliments to me than ‘ooh you smell nice’, so as long as the memories I evoke are good ones, and make people want to see me again, I’m happy for my legacy to be leaving fragrant chemtrails behind me, wherever I go.

Isn’t it the strangest thought that one day, maybe decades from now, someone will take a deep breath in and be reminded of you, just for a second?

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BLIND DATE

I reviewed the Guardian Blind Date again this week and it features the word ‘yap’ a lot. Really. Too much, tbh. READ NOW

ONE-LINER

To mark the April 17th release of the paperback of my ‘very funny’ fourth novel LEADING MAN, I’m posting ONE line from the book here, from every 25 pages or so, in an attempt to bait you into preordering. This comes from p.175:

His eyes circled my nose like he was trying to focus on a wasp on a gateau.

Some of my best work there. LEADING MAN is about a people-pleaser who’s never taken centre-stage but finds himself at the centre of a series of melodramas and has to react accordingly. It is funny, sweet, spiky, and then it changes direction entirely. Preordering can make a huge difference to a book’s success, so please do if you can. Bookshop.org | Amazon | Waterstones

I also put together a playlist of music that appears in the book, plus some tracks that incorporate some of LEADING MAN’s central themes.