Mnemonics

Today I caught a whiff of a smell. It was acrid, indescribable, like burnt rubber. There is no more powerful trigger of memory then smell, where each particle of scent is catapulted directly to the limbic system: the brain's deep-seated, primal centre of hunger, dreams and sex.

The odor was so alien, yet integral to my past. An intense lonliness, casting back through the angsty, joyfully-wasted years of adolescence, back to when I was 10, in a big warm bed in London on a winter night.

It was The Wind In The Willows, the last book my mother read to me before I started on my own. Mr. Toad was in jail, being served a plate heaped full of toasted, meltingly-buttered thick bread. That was when I first smelt it. Whether real or imagined, it was acute, specific and desolate - a longing for something more then just simple food.

I can't say what this means. Some people with brain tumours often claim they smell burning rubber, but life has never dealt me such drama before, and I doubt it ever will.