The Edge of Remembering

They've stopped making my favourite perfume. This makes me sad - I feel like every time I get really attached to something like this (and this was a fragrance I chose myself, for me, not because anyone I knew wore it or I was talked into it or it was advertised) it gets discontinued. Hmm...Midas in reverse. Trout, everything you touch will dematerialise. So now it's time to choose a new one, and I'm reminded of the strange power of scent.

I find that smell, more than any other sense, has the tantalising ability to balance things right on the edge of your memory. Chase them too hard and they'll disappear entirely. (I turned to look but it was gone...) My favourite perfume reminded me distantly, distantly of my first trip to England (and so of watercolour sunshine and horse chestnuts and tea and midnight foxes) even though no-one I knew there had ever heard of it. The smell of Oil of Ulan makes me think of my mother - she tells me she only wore it when I was a baby. I remember doing the washing once when my Dad was quite ill in hospital and crying at the smell of his aftershave on a jumper.

The smell of sorbolene cream is the smell of preschool, but I've never been able to figure out why. Our Grade 5 classroom smelled like damp hessian, even though I can't remember what it looked like.

And the most pungent smell in the universe is wet German shepherd.