Balderdasha posted about this yesterday and, as it's a subject I've been meaning to start a thread about for a while now, that was the nudge I needed.
Shall we restrict ourselves to smells and tastes. I'm sure that we all have a huge number of examples, so ruling out visual and aural triggers and the like might help stop the thread from wandering too much. But, hey, it's up to you.
There really are too many to list. Summer holidays as a child, with the smell of petrol at filling stations, tar at roadworks and the campsite washroom smells, both the soap and the shit. School dinners - the shredded cheddar on the salads, jam and butterscotch tarts. The food at home that I barely or never eat these days - cold cuts of roast lamp with tomato ketchup and a Dairylea cheese triangle, saveloys, chicken fritters, proper deep-fried chips, pots of Ski yoghurt filled with sugar. The cleaning fluid in the hospital where I almost died from peritonitis in my teens. The chalk, desk-wood and stationary smells of school. Bowling alley polish. The cooking smells of a Mediterranean holiday evening.
Far too many.
And my favourite. Do you know, I'm really not sure what it was exactly. It was the smell created when my grandma cooked us breakfast over an open fire in her little cottage. I think it was usually buttery toast and poached eggs mixed in with the smell of the coal fire and it's not a smell that I've encountered since, but should I do so I'll instantly be transported back to a small village in North Wales in the late-1960s.
Shall we restrict ourselves to smells and tastes. I'm sure that we all have a huge number of examples, so ruling out visual and aural triggers and the like might help stop the thread from wandering too much. But, hey, it's up to you.
There really are too many to list. Summer holidays as a child, with the smell of petrol at filling stations, tar at roadworks and the campsite washroom smells, both the soap and the shit. School dinners - the shredded cheddar on the salads, jam and butterscotch tarts. The food at home that I barely or never eat these days - cold cuts of roast lamp with tomato ketchup and a Dairylea cheese triangle, saveloys, chicken fritters, proper deep-fried chips, pots of Ski yoghurt filled with sugar. The cleaning fluid in the hospital where I almost died from peritonitis in my teens. The chalk, desk-wood and stationary smells of school. Bowling alley polish. The cooking smells of a Mediterranean holiday evening.
Far too many.
And my favourite. Do you know, I'm really not sure what it was exactly. It was the smell created when my grandma cooked us breakfast over an open fire in her little cottage. I think it was usually buttery toast and poached eggs mixed in with the smell of the coal fire and it's not a smell that I've encountered since, but should I do so I'll instantly be transported back to a small village in North Wales in the late-1960s.
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