Smells….

Sericol Screen printing ink.
Going into my mums work when I was little, 4 ish..
We still use it occasionally, love the smell.
I am not a solvent abuser..

The woods at night time – a very specific smell which has always brought out my wild side. I have been known to cut short the daytime dog walk so we’ll both have enough energy to walk through the benighted woods.

2 stroke. Not smelled often these days but reminds me of my RD350 YPVS. And being a total knob on it.
Tar. Road repairers stuff. Not a lot of it about these days but takes me way back. Nothing specific, just does.
Soles of new slippers. Weird, granted, but reminds me of hot water bottles as a kid. Look a bit strange sniffing them in Tesco mind.

Most have been done:

Freshly cut grass – lived near a massive field, reminds me of young summer evenings.
Hot tar – there was (and still is) a tarmac yard down my parent’s lane, Saturday morning would be their delivery day for the weekend work where it normally went to the work site in the week.
GT85 – the smell of the cyclist.
Castrol R – my dad was involved with vintage racing so this was the smell of a lot of weekends in my youth.
Burning electric motors – Scalextric cars do wear out eventually.
Fresh pancakes – Friday was pancake day at nan’s house after school.

welshfarmer – now I have a name for that smell, was awful visiting friend’s farms and getting the whiff of it.

The two stroke/meths mix they put in Speedway bikes.
Fresh hops being brewed on a cold morning.

Hot 2 stroke fumes, mmmmm 500cc GP bikes

That damp firework smell the morning after bonfire night, takes me back to being a kid “helping” Dad in the garden in November.

Festivals: almost too many olfactory assaults to mention, but the definitive one for me is the smell of those stalls selling hot candied nuts, mixed with a whiff of amyl nitrate.

You don’t seem to get it now, but the smell of a new pair of batting gloves. With leather palms, and usually a bit of tissue paper between them to stop them sticking together, they were dusted with some kind of powder as well. I don’t know what the definitive smell was, or whether it was a combination of the leather, kapok stuffing and powder, but it had a definite smell. It was also the smell of Blakes Sports in Reading which was the only proper cricket shop in Reading when i was growing up.

I smelt it again fairly recently but i haven’t a clue where. But it takes you straight back.

Castrol A545, takes me straight back to my 89 Stan Stephens tuned RM250.

I like the smell of October

Makes me drunk as **** and high on mushrooms and acid, being taught to cook chicken fried rice in a Belizian woman’s kitchen with Hallowe’en and bonfire night shenanigans and scrumpy looming giddy and primitive into my periphery

As someone has said, cow shit. Takes me back to teenage years working on a dairy farm on weekends and holidays. They were my second family.

It’s closed now 🙁

+1 for rain on a summer evening, preferably at the end of June when everything is still green and lush and the faint smell of the tail end of Spring is still in the air.

Oh and Lace by Yardley. Twenty six years and four months later I’m taken back to the arms of my first g/f during that endlessly hot summer of blue skies, adventure and all night parties.

plastecine…reminds me of primary school

The combination of GT85 & new tyres – my first Saturday job, spannering in the LBS when I was 14.

Putting a shot of Jack Daniels in my coffee – my room at Uni as a fresher.

Uncatalysed petrol exhaust fumes – any of the family cars we had when growing up, but mainly my Dad’s Scimitar when he used to pick me up from school on a Friday afternoon.

2 stroke + the pop pop sound of a Lambretta.
Happy days

The smell of Calamine Lotion takes me back to having Chicken Pox. The smell of it gives me the dry boak to this day.

Interesting how many people remember natural smells and how few remember perfumes; I guess that’s because you can’t smell the old classics any more as the EU has outlawed many of the more interesting ingredients for supposed safety reasons. Brut doesn’t smell much like Brut any more, sadly, since certain key synthetic musks were banned.

And the man farts and the woman has to try and bite the bubbles…

Errr…Pac-Manning?

Linseed Oil . Those summers when we were all 8 – 9 that lasted 3 months and the sun came out everyday and time seemed to stand still, the amount of fun that could be fitted into one single day was pretty monumental. Cricket was sometimes on the agenda if there were enough of us around.

Cold Tar Soap. See above

Izal Toilet paper . See above but 200 miles away at my grandparents

Stormhaven scout tents. Ours were proofed and always had a distinct smell of damp canvas and chemicals. Unique .

boiling crabs takes me back to a caravan in France when I was 6

the EU has outlawed many of the more interesting ingredients for supposed safety reasons

Is that actually true?

Freshly opened cans of Tenants lager… zooms back in time

Wintergreen/deep heat : rugby glory days
Our flatcoat retriever: past shooting days
Anstruther harbour: …….

Anstruther harbour: …….

……Coach parties of pensioners? 🙂

Hot bike engine/oil smell, takes me back to 13 years old and I had bought a Royal Enfield super meteor from a ted who lived in Ewell. it had that hot oil smell when it got hot.

The smell of a real Christmas tree in the house immediately takes me back to my family home as a child.

I’m going to add two here:

The Sea, this has a certain evocative “tang” to me. It’s hard to explain but easy to recognise. There is a freshness to the spray that pops off the bow, and a sort of humid warm ambiance that exits the stern.. hard to describe I know.

And.

Low water estuaries, the sulfur tang, the damp atmosphere and the salt all equate to one of the most memorable smells in the whole world. Once I smell it, I know I’m at home.

Peat fires.

zing: back in smalltown Ireland, c. 1987. 🙂

Oh, and two things that remind me of my childhood – Tea Roses immediately take me back to being a kid in my grandad’s garden. And creosote on a sunny day – whoosh, sensory overload and time travel 🙂

Art shops – pencils and oil paint and lots of unbleached paper – heaven

the EU has outlawed many of the more interesting ingredients for supposed safety reasons

Is that actually true?

Yes. I work in the industry and we now have no fewer than five chemistry graduates doing nothing other than safety compliance, including calculating the maximum permitted dosages of all the 3000 raw materials in our formulations when used in leave-on or wash-off products. With all the sub-formulations used it can sometimes take the computer several minutes to work out all the levels. Many great raw materials like nitro musks and polycyclic musks have fallen by the wayside and are no longer allowed, which is why perfumes are becoming more and more samey.

Warm maram grass on the edge of sand dunes. Brings back my very happy yearly holidays in North Norfolk as a young kid. An associated sound was that of skylarks whilst sitting warm in the sun in the shelter of the dunes.

Castrol R in a slightly different context to the above, at Old Warden watching and smelling the rotary engined aeroplanes as a 10 year old.

Stockholm tar from old sailing vessels I visited as a kid

How many people experienced a vivid olfactory hallucination at the suggestion of a smell?

The strongest I had was when reading ‘plasticine’… Still lingering now, thanks 🙂

Castrol R in a slightly different context to the above, at Old Warden watching and smelling the rotary engined aeroplanes as a 10 year old.

Old Warden still smells like that to me at times – because my brother lives there with a rather large collection of vws and assorted other motorbikes . . . I’m not sure everyone else in the village appreciates his collection!