Sense and Sniffability

Sunday morning brunch: paratha, stuffed with a chilli and onion omelette.  Before she even takes a bite (snatching it away from Simon's grubby, wiggling fingers and ignoring his anguished howls of 'more, more'...) Jacqui is sniffing madly and looking glazed...

It's not the eye-watering onion or the all-powerful chilli, not even the dextrous daintiness (poetic licence for those of you viewing the door-step pictured in the link below) of the rolled-up flatbread.  It's the smell; the spicy, warm, bready, just-cooked-eggy scent of a roadside food stall in rural Bangladesh.  It got us talking about the evocative nature of the sense of smell, that fleeting whiff across the nostrils that has us momentarily in a different place or time.  For Jacqui, Bangladesh was locked inside that paratha, but my Bangladesh wafts on a nostalgic air of RID insect repellent... 

Christine had a vat of it with her on that first trip and as it was far superior to mine and she appeared immune to the bugs anyway, I commandeered it.  I noticed the smell at the time, of course, pungent with it's throat-catching chemicals but back in Ireland the empty container was consigned to the bin and that was that until a few years later when I saw Christine at home in Sydney.  It was sunny, spidery and I was sleeping on the floor of her music room; 'Here,' she said, throwing me a spray can, 'douse yourself before the bed bugs bite.'  I took the lid off and my head - metaphorically - spun.  One sniff and I was back in Khalia, in the Peace Library in the midst of an interminable (now rose-coloured) House Meeting... Back in sydney, each time I awoke during the night to check for funnel web spiders, I uncapped the RID, had a quick snort and was transported.  It was like my very own olfactory time machine.

If I could bottle the effect, RID would be one of several:
  • woodsmoke rising from a village in La Creuse
  • Chanel No.5 in the midst of the freezing, snowing backroads of Co. Mayo one February
  • cooking oil frying the chipsi mayai of Songea, Tanzania
  • Elizabeth Arden's Red Door perfume framing the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica
Aaahhh.... just like the Bisto adverts say.

And it was just after that paratha-brunch, I realised that time doesn't dull the effect either.  I opened a pink bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion the other day; it was handed to me to slather on Simon and I'd no recollection of ever using it before.  Then, in a nano-second twenty-five years disappeared and I was on Kibbutz Kfar Hahoresh, near Nazareth, getting ready for the Friday Shabbat dinner...

Anne xx

http://instagr.am/p/M0F5AwBSoX/  


The truth, the whole truth and...reviews
Missed the (MADD) boat!

Comments

 
No comments made yet. Be the first to submit a comment
Already Registered? Login Here
Guest
Sunday, 13 October 2024

Blog Archive

Popular Blog Posts

30 April 2019
29 August 2019
30 November 2016

Tag Cloud

No tags has been created yet.