The Smelly Side of Life

As autumn begins, a familiar smell is noticeable as I drive around the countryside.  No sooner has one crop been harvested than the farmer is preparing the fields for the next one, and preparation means one thing ... muck!  One of my earliest memories is of my mother grumbling about the smell when dad came home from work after muck-spreading, and her acknowledgement that it (i.e. pigs' or cows') wasn't so bad as chickens'.  In that vein, I recall a few years ago taking my camper-van to a farmyard site where they kept ducks, and how they instantly reminded me of a visit at the age of about four or five to a great-uncle who lived on a farm, where there were ducks in the orchard, and how we were told to mind where we walked!

Smell is the most powerful of man's senses, they say; it's certainly connected to the brain's power of recollection, and triggers all kinds of memories from the past.  Another early memory of mine is of the journey to school past the bakery, with the early-morning smell of fresh bread bringing some relief from the agonies of cycling up a steep hill.

The variety of places that my work takes me presents an equally varied selection of smells and memories, some of which I share - for good or ill - with the people I collect from or deliver to.  This week, for example, I collected from a small firm working with fibreglass, and I recounted the tale of the director of one of the companies I worked for, who had an interest in small boats.  He made an arrangement with a boat-builder to utilise part of the ground behind our factory, and we got involved with the administration of this new business as well as our own ... totally different in scale and attitude from the precision electronics that were our 'bread and butter'!

I often find myself at the door of a machine shop or fabrication business, and am reminded of a four-year spell working for a company that manufactured agricultural machinery.  I'd not been there long, when the finance director came into our office one day and genially asked how I was getting on.  After a few pleasant exchanges he looked over at my boss and, perhaps remembering what he had come in for, indicated by way of encouragement how far I might go if I were to apply myself. "Look at Snellin' there," he said.  (The cost accountant's name was Snelling, but this man had a pretentious, quasi-aristocratic habit of dropping his g's.)  "He's costin' a foundry."  My boss had been asked to spend some time introducing a costing system at a sister company a few miles away, which made castings for our machines.  One day I accompanied him on a visit and discovered - just as when, many years later, I visited Whitechapel Bell Foundry - that this is another industry that has a very distinctive smell.

Of course, when you are working in a particular environment all the while, you don't notice the smell.  Just as with the things I wrote about last week, the body - in this case the sense of smell - gets used to it.  Another recognisable 'fragrance', sometimes detected in the supermarket and many other places, is what I call an 'old people' smell.  It's really down to a simple lack of fresh air; if you live all week with the windows and doors always shut, the air gets stale, and this staleness transfers to the clothes you wear.  I sometimes notice it when I come home in the evening, but only for a minute or two.  The smell hasn't gone ... I've just got used to it again.  With a 'retirement' week ahead of me, I'm hoping for sunshine so that I can have my windows open a lot of the time!