Sweet smells are an important part of my life. I wear perfume every day, use scented hand creams (the current favourite is ginger), there are fragranced candles and melts dotted about the house, we have room sprays and those little bottles of smelly stuff that you plonk sticks in. I buy things like bathroom sprays, shampoo and washing up liquid, laundry powder and handwash (ooh, chocolate orange and bubblegum) purely based on their pong.
Memories, as we all know, are so often tied up with scents.
Like my mum's face cream, my gran's Sunday lunch apple pies, Lyons' coffee bubbling away on the gas stove in the percolator 'bought' by my parents with Embassy cigarette coupons, the first bottle of scent ('Miss Americana') I bought for myself.
Like the sawdust that covered every surface in my friend's grandad's workshop which we visited to collect little offcuts of wood and which I discovered many years later was where the coffins were made for his undertakers business.
Like the calomine lotion dabbed on 'midgie' bites in the summer, teeny paper wrapped rectangles of cinnamon flavoured Dentyne chewing gum, ink stained fingers after practising joined up writing in junior school using scratchy pens dipped in inkwells filled by that week's Ink Monitor, the perfectly folded packets of Beecham's powders my brother always insisted cured every ill.
Like the kitchen sink being scrubbed with Vim, the green blocks of Fairy household soap my dad used to wash his hair, the mister's aroma of patchouli oil when we first met.
So so many, a whiff of any of which would catapult me right back.
A recent present from me to me (why, thank you) was another candle.
Oh my goodness. It's the smell of packets of crunchy Parma violets, of little bunches of purple flowers with heart shaped leaves which used to appear on the nature table at the back of Mrs Whitehouse's classroom, of Yardley Christmas gifts bought for my mum at the Co-op chemists with a ten bob note from my dad and enough left over to buy something for everyone else on my list. A tad expensive but so beautifully packaged and so highly fragranced, I may not need to light it.
A new (to me) aran jumper also found its way through the letterbox (actually it was left by the garden gate). It's a lovely handknit and, after a careful wash (I'm renowned for my efforts at keeping Barbie's wardrobe well stocked), now smells of what the container describes as 'Sunburst'.
Still doesn't make me look like Alexa Chung, though.