A product of Distorte.
Pulling a day-old roast of beef from the cold oven, to make sandwiches for work, the smell is the smell of the oven in Granny’s range. Specifically her taking out a plate left in to stay warm, to give to my uncle coming in off the farm. Dinner is at noon, and not much later. I sit on a stool and watch and slide my hands around the laminated table.
Cycling through the hills of Kildare with dad, I get the soft, full smell of an oak fire, or some other hardwood. One of the farmhouses we’re passing is burning wood, and it smells just like Granny’s. There’s a permanent stack of large timber discs in the corner of her field nearest the house all year. It’s added to whenever a tree on the land falls. The range is lit from September through April. Granny walks out periodically and comes in with three segments in the crook of her arm. She levers out a small circular lid from the iron top using a black nubbin. Two blocks go in and the third is used as a poker to jam down the edges until it will also fit. Heat rushes out. She replaces the lid but I can still hear a dull roar from within. It is the only warm room in the house.
The smell of the blue liquid soap in the house in Kerry, which has probably been sitting in the corner of the sink for years, reminds me strongly of washing off sand from the beach in summertime. It doesn’t even have a beachy smell, but the house that I visit perhaps once a season is a time machine. It makes three months seem three days and three years seem three months. Like stepping between parallel dimensions that run at different speeds.
The smell of walnuts. In the sitting room eating walnuts beside the fire. Mam trying to convince us they were lovely. They smell and taste like dry wood. I mention this because of the banana bread studded with them on Saturday. How walnuts come alive with other tastes. How Mam was right, conditionally.
My uncle used smell like pipe tobacco, and I realised, hugging him yesterday, that he doesn’t anymore. And he hasn’t in twenty years but the two since I saw him last triggered that memory. A smell memory defined by its absence.
I used to worry, moving out of the homestead, that the place would change. That I would come home to find home gone and me a piece of lonely thistledown adrift over barren rock for the rest of my life.
And it did change, or is changing. Minutely. It smells distinctly different on a Friday evening home. The kitchen. More lentils. Other changes too, less related to smell. Plants gone. New soap. What’s striking me now is how inconsequential this distancing feels.
A flowering plant, walking today, smelled like this flowering plant smells every year. A plant I have no name for. It is tall and drooped, and its flowers come small and purple in a six-inch cone-ish shape. I thought about this, and how mainly I subscribe to the the theory that words provide structure for thoughts, that we build our logical abilities in tandem with our lingual development. And yet I have so many things around me, both physical and otherwise, that I have no word for. The scent is stored away to be retrieved next spring. What did they file it under?
The smell of cold lamb stew on the cooker can transform any kitchen into a farmhouse. It’s not a particularly pleasant smell until it’s heated up. Reminds me of strangers’ hallways. Homes in which thousands of meals of winter vegetables and meat and potatoes have left their trace ingrained in the walls and the surface of the kitchen table.
For some reason a lot of art galleries smell like a gooey translucent putty I used have as a child. It came in a plastic egg and never dried. It was designed to be disgusting, I think, but its slimy texture seemed less odd than its weird, salty odour.
Galleries smell like this, I think, because there is nothing in the room to soak up the smell of plasterwork, sealants, something similar. Perhaps it’s the paint itself. Perhaps what I am smelling is art. Now that I think about it studios often smell the same way.
The red apple I’m eating smells like an evergreen woods. The kind where the trees group tightly, their branches casting a deep gloom over the forest floor. It’s too dark for much else to grow, all you can see is dry soil and sprigs of ivy extending into the darkness. There a musty kind of smell like rotting timber and moss, but not strong. It tastes a little like that too.
The smell of human decay. Sitting in the waiting room at the dentist some years ago, a woman comes running in from the surgery across the hall. She is clutching her jaw. The room instantly fills up with the smell of death. A nurse chases after and wraps her arms around the woman’s shoulders, trying to guide her back towards the waiting chair, towards whatever procedure remains half-completed. The woman is utterly silent, wide-eyed, reluctant, reminding me of a wild animal, trapped.
The smell of the toilet when I forget to flush before going to work is piss, I suppose. But a kind of weak, watery smell mixed with cleaning products. It reminds me of standing over the trough in French campsites at the end of a day’s driving. Glorious relief at pissing and the warm evening and finally getting free of the car. So much reminds me of French campsites.
The smell of coal tar soap. This was the soap we kept in our washroom. Work man’s soap. It would sit there for months in the rarely-used sink, drying and cracking but reanimating instantly on contact with water. I began to buy it again for the shower at home a few years ago. It has a sharp, medicinal odour. Nothing makes you feel so clean. After picking up a bar for my new flat, I’m thinking I’ll have to dump it. It overpowers the small rooms. Smells like a hospital in here.
The smell of old mahogany, experienced recently during music festival in the grounds of an 18th century castle. We popped inside to see the rooms during one of the many showers. It reminds me of afternoons spent touring houses, castles, museums, churches. Soaking up Irish history. We are overflowing with history, and much of it smells like old, old wood.
The smell of cigars and drink off old men remind me sometimes of my father when I was young. Not that he smokes, nor drinks very often. But I remember him sneaking in to wish me good night after coming back late, and leaning down over the bed for a hug, and the smells he’d picked up from the pub or the show he’d come home from. Cigars and drinks.
It’s occurred to me since that the smell of drink off their father would be a negative one for so many people, but to me it is one of the warmest, most comforting memories of my childhood.
The vague smell of smoking that fills my bathroom in the evening. Someone in the building is smoking in theirs, and the ventilation pushes it round. It takes me back a few years to before the smoking ban. The smell of it in every pub. Being honest, I miss it. I supported the ban, and a large part of me still does for the same reasons as always. But I still miss it. It gave character to old pubs. Now they smell of disinfectant and bodies. Old men stand outside on cold nights and drag pathetically on lit ends, and it feels like something important has been traded in for our brave new world. I am confused by this irrational response in me. I would switch back tomorrow if I could, but I don’t tell people that because I can’t justify it.
The smell off a diesel truck I pass on the main street instantly returns me to the deck of car ferries, sailing to France. Occasional visits outside for fresh air and views of the ocean. Standing on riveted metal balconies not built with tourists in mind. People vomiting. Seagulls hovering when near enough land. And oil and the smell of diesel everywhere. Cold, even in high summer. We could only stand a few minutes before returning into the warmth of ugly cafeterias and smoke-filled bars. Slot machines lining the walls. A thousand bottles clinking in chorus as the ship beat its way south towards the continent.
The smell of cherry blossoms the second week in January. Walking down Wellington road, one of the richest in the city. Past beautiful Georgian three-storey houses, the only thing that awakens in me a desire to one day have money. Real money.
The blossoms are too early, and my delight at their bouquet is quickly offset by worry and guilt. “Is it too early for blossoms? It’s too early. Why are they out so early? Are we really as fucked as they say we are?”
The smell of the Guinness brewery in Dublin, which can float for a mile or two in any direction when the wind wants it. I do not quite know how to describe it to you, but what it has always reminded me of is hot milk and Weetabix, with an edge. You may not have such things where you are.
The smell is warm and comforting. It’s like food, but doesn’t make you hungry. I think of being driven into town, early in the mornings, we would pass right by St. James’s Gate and I would know by the air where we were.
I catch it very occasionally in the streets near my work. Like all the best smell memories it reminds me gently of where I am, but in a broader context now than before.
The smell of the Christmas tree. The most welcome smell in the week before, but kind of saddening when it’s all finished. We take it down on the 6th of January — Little Christmas, Women’s Christmas, Nollaig na mBan. If you leave decorations up beyond this date, they are possessed by phúcaí that give you bad luck for as long as they stay.
The smell of wood shavings and glue — the technology lab in school. Where, for construction studies, I would spend my Saturday mornings sweating and cursing over T-joints and dovetails, emerging from some private hell two hours later with a jagged, piss-poor imitation of the sample model. The other guys around me, would effortlessly assemble perfect pieces that slotted together like legs in the finest furniture. All the while making time time to slag each others’ mas.
They spent the last half hour delicately sanding to the perfect finish, while I asked around for advice on fixing that week’s fuckup. After quickly showing the supervisor our work we would each toss our joints into the same scraps bin on the way out the door.
Following on, the smell of pheasant cooking. Which, like so much coming into winter, reminds me of Christmas. The sharp and gamey scent of roasting pheasant promises a small section of dark meat and the chance of picking shot from between your teeth. And roast potatoes. Always roast potatoes.
The smell of unplucked pheasant hanging by their necks in the washroom. Musty and rank. A strange odour to find indoors. Sometimes I would brush my face against them accidentally in the dark.
Not smelt recently; Granny provides them skinned in recent years, in ziplock freezer bags. This is probably the final demarcation of my mother’s perceived move into townie-ism.
The smell of babies’ heads. A hopeless cliché, but just about the best smell. It is wired into us. Nothing should remind us of our stunted instincts so much as our inexplicable, unified reaction to the milky warm scent of a newborn’s scalp.
The smell of the mushroom farm. If you have never smelt a mushroom farm it is a difficult thing to describe. It smells like dying, lost and alone on a distant planet.
We visited my granny and great-aunt on weeknights, driving through pitch blackness across straight bog roads to my dad’s home town. I can’t remember if we talked much, it feels like often we didn’t. Music featured heavily.
The odour would begin about three miles outside the town. It seemed prominent in that dark and silent setting, tingling my nostrils. To be honest, if there was anywhere a smell like this was suited, this place was it.
The smell of pencil parings, almost lost in an adolescence full of plastic and ink and the horrifying weight of blank sheets of paper. Rediscovering pencils felt significant. I like the parers that store shavings in a little box you can sniff from time to time.
Isn’t it funny that electric pencil sharpeners exist?
The smell of a couple of tonnes of turf filling half the garage. Which smells much as you’d imagine — like you took the bog inside and dried it out. You stacked and collected an acre of turf one summer. It took up the whole back room and more, spilling out into a ceiling-high mountain that lasted well through the year. On black winter nights you’d head out with a bucket and pull randomly from the shapeless mound until you’d filled it. Desiccated nettle leaves dried to the sod would sting your hands gently, almost affectionately.
The overpowering chemical smell of garden centres. Which is, if you think about it, a strange odour to associate with the growing of plants and trees.
The smell of her hair. Or skin, or pyjamas. Strawberry with an edge of vanilla. More like a lotion than perfume. You rest your face against her shoulder blades, trying not to inhale too vigourously. Lying snug like spoons in the agreed platonic sleeping arrangement. Twisted awkwardly to angle away the twin liabilities of your chest and crotch. You risk a hand on her soft belly and she covers it with her own. You fall asleep. Platonically.
The smell of wet paint reminds you of summer, and occasionally being set to work against walls, fences, fascia boards. Ruining good clothes. Relearning techniques every time. And the fat splatter of green paint on the toe of your runner, which pissed you off mightily when it happened but you missed when it was finally gone.
The smell of horses. You were excited, aged five, when your mother signed you up for lessons. You weren’t one of those horse kids, but the idea seemed fun. And it was fun, frightening fun. The breadth and power and musty sweat off a horse’s back seems even more massive when you’re five.
But the instructors were mean, week after week. Mean to a five-year-old! You couldn’t believe it. You were good at cataloguing your grievances, even then. Eventually you quit.
You pass within 20 metres of the riding school on the way home evenings. Once sheltered by tree-lined fields, the new road has cut away the house’s solitude. The stables are ruinously dilapidated, roofs caved in and doors off hinges. Three horses graze the field behind the yard.
The remains of the jumps are still there, where one afternoon with inexperienced kicks you accidentally ran your horse over the demonstration pole, clinging on for dear life. It was less than two feet tall. “Did you see him gallop!” you panted afterwards, half embarrassed, half proud. “Canter,” your sister pointed out. “He was cantering.”
The smell of my trick-or-treat bag, which I would generally find under my bed a couple of weeks after Hallowe’en. The smell was of gently composting fruit and nuts, leftovers after the sweets had been extracted. I would make an effort but it’s hard to get through five pounds of assorted healthyness.
It seems like there was a lot more fruit in the 80’s compared to what kids get nowadays. Apples and boxes of raisins and oceans of monkey-nuts. And little plastic bags of popcorn, sealed with a rubber band.
The smell of Colorado. Like dry air and always a hint of cinnamon. The whole state seemed to smell like this. Comforting but alien. Unlike anywhere in Europe. Perhaps all of the Americas smell this way, but I’m more inclined to pin it on the fact I’d never been 1200 miles from the sea before. Europe smells wetter. As do, I’m sure, the coastal states.
The smell of hash at outdoor gigs. Which comes, unmistakable, wafting above the heads of the crowd. You feel somewhat aggrieved when the guy smoking next to you doesn’t offer around. Not that you would have accepted, necessarily. It just seems slightly against the spirit of the enterprise.
The smell of fireworks. Which would be gunpowder I suppose. Illegal as they are in Ireland, you will still find them pretty readily available in weeks leading up to Hallowe’en. I obtained fireworks a few times in my childhood, bangers were and are the most common variety sought by mischief makers. You might call them firecrackers.
A newsagents down town sold packets of Black Cats under the counter one year. If you knew how to ask, and laid the requisite 2.50 on the counter, the sweet old lady who ran the place would pass them to you without a word.
The red, cigarette-shaped box in my jeans pocket probably caused me more stress than enjoyment. I sweated over the number left, the number I still had to pretend to get some fun out of. In setting them off I exercised the kind of care that would be beyond most adults, yet still expected at any moment I would remove a digit or an eye. They went bang. That was all they did.
The smell of the dog food factory. You can catch it most any evening driving through the east side of town. The odour wafting out of the industrial estate is broiling meat, but not entirely right at that. Like a lasagna left roasting at a low heat for three months. Definitely not quite food. And yet…
On cold winter evenings, when the bus has run late and you haven’t eaten in hours, your first reaction when the smell works its way into the air conditioning is the rumbling of your belly. This momentary confusion makes it far worse than those smells which are merely disgusting.
The smell of unwashed hair. Which, if you’d all just be truthful with yourselves for a moment, is a pretty nice smell. If it’s coming off the right person. Not just random guys on the train.
The smell of dentists’ gloves. Or is it taste? At a certain point it becomes difficult to tell. All you’ve got is this presence filling what feels like your entire head. Touch, taste, smell, it all becomes one confused experience.
You’ve been visiting a new dentist for a while now. She is young and very attractive. She goes in hard with the plaque remover. Extremely painfully. You’ve no idea how to go about impressing her, but crying silently as she works is probably a bad start. You often wonder if she’s ever had this procedure performed on her. She doesn’t seem to understand.
Will she respect you if you show a little resistance? Or is she turned on by flawlessly clean teeth. Maybe that’s like taking her work home with her. Much like chefs who binge on oven chips and pizza after a long day in the kitchen, maybe what she’s secretly looking for is a really manky set of molars. You should probably stop flossing.
The smell of cigar smoke. Mostly associated with sitting in the back garden on long summer evenings. When candles fail to keep the midges at bay someone goes inside and comes out with a couple of aluminium tubes and hands them around. Some appear to enjoy the taste, others take as few pulls as is necessary to keep the tip smoking. A gentle haze slowly surrounds the table, fending off uninvited guests. Anti-social smoking, you might say.
The smell of bus exhausts. Gouts of noxious fumes hit you in the face several times a day. An unavoidable part of the city parcel. You’ve had a bit of an issue with this ever since a religion teacher told you about a London square where the babies began to get very sick, all at once. In numbers that defied statistical probability. The eventual cause was found to be their inhaling of exhaust fumes while waiting in buggies to cross a busy carriageway to the park every afternoon. They weren’t yet solid enough to resist the effects of a daily lung-full of chemicals.
You don’t even know if the story was true; it was religion class after all. But you find yourself holding your breath a lot in any case. This is one of your top ten rules to a long and healthy life.
Number 7: hold your breath when walking behind buses.
The smell of new books. The kind with heavily laminated pages you used get in school. Rather than the pleasant, organic frangrance of glued paper, when fanned open these pages release a sharp chemical tang coupled with the inexplicable stench of old, boiled cabbage.
Laminated, one presumes, to help resist the touch of grubby children’s fingers. The smell is historically associated with crushing content and uninspired page design that you resented, even then.
The smell out the front door of the local butchers. An unwelcome affront to your delicate constitution, at least before nine in the morning. Curiously divorced from the idea of food, it is a cold and disinfected and slightly flat odour. But always traced with the unmistakable undertone of blood.
Disinfectant and blood, it’s no surprise the gut churns at the clash of these bases. The cave and the kitchen. The cleaver and the cloth. We do not want to be reminded at nine in the morning how close we still sit to the campfire.
The smell of good brown bread, cut thick. Sniffed almost compulsively after slicing, before buttering. A quick barometer for quality, much like nosing a glass of wine. Deep and grainy with a hint of burnt crust. A layered odour with almost endless variation. One of the best smells there is.