Wake up and smell the....

 

Today, whilst traipsing around the supermarket with youngest, her eye fell upon salad cream.  She asked what it was and I was tempted to buy it just for nostalgic reasons, just for the smell.  I never really liked it but it was such a childhood memory jolt.  Egg mayonnaise was just "mashed egg".  Hardboiled eggs with salad cream.

 

Sense of smell.  Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to bottle our history in smells?  Not the nappies or anything like that, of course...  But not just the nice ones.  Things that genuinely jog your memory like school dinners, beaches, the fur of a pet or toasting marshmallows.

 

Another reason for thinking about this was finding myself in a secondary school changing room yesterday (waiting for youngest to finish gym).  Oh good grief, that smell!  Dettol, sweat, cheap perfume, it gave me quite a start when I went through the door.  I did not have a good time at secondary school and PE was a particular point of torture....

 

So here is the challenge for the future.  To add smells to my children's family history trove.  Not sure how to achieve this yet but anyway...

 

I would love to be able to experience some of the smells from my family history.  The India side would be fascinating, of course.  But what about a first smell of the ocean from someone who has been land locked for their whole life?  A whiff of gunpowder from a Napoleonic battlefield.  A dusty old country chapel with that distinctive hymn book smell.  Silver polish from a country house.

 

As referred to a little while back, there has been a BBC2 series called Back In Time For Dinner recently, charting the history of family food since the war.  How much better would that have been with Smellevision??!