Can't you smell that smell?

'And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.' *

You know how they always say, the most powerful tool for evoking memories is the sense of smell. Well, I agree. And so does Proust.

If I believed in past lives and reincarnations, I'd be positive that I was a dog in my past life. A dog or some other four-legged mammal with extraordinary olfactory prowess. In fact, I seem to be able to smell (and taste) things much better than most of the people I know. This occasionally results in weirdness; I can't drink milk unless it's really fresh. I can tell when it's one day before the expiry date. I can't stand cheese that's not uber-fresh either. And don't get me started on that thing they call gorgonzola. To willingly eat mould seems abominable to me.

I sincerely hope you skipped that uninteresting paragraph on my eating habits.

As I was saying, smells can evoke memories in a way that sight and sound can't. Proust seems to have a theory on that: when you smell something familiar, you get an emotional reaction as well as a physical recognition of something that's filed away in your brain. That's why it ends up being much more powerful than anything else.

A few days ago, we went on a family road trip to the Lago d'Orta, a tiny lake in Northern Italy. There was a monastery on an island in the middle of the lake. In Turkish, 'orta' means middle, so there was some subdued merriment at the fact that there was an island in the middle of a lake called middle. OK, fine, you had to be there. We didn't actually go on the island, but I took a lovely little photo which you can see below.

We ate at a restaurant on the lake. It was a rather 'fancy' establishment, I must say. The menu was very weird and the ambiance very refined. I ended up having something very unusual: rice with something sweet in it (probably blackberry, as the thing was black), surrounded by a sauce made out of saffron and zucchini, with shrimp wrapped up in ham.

No, I am not joking. That is exactly what I had.

It tasted surprisingly nice, although the ham sort of killed the shrimp. In a metaphorical sense, of course. The shrimp was already dead.

But I digress.

As in all restaurants, there were napkins next to the plates. As soon as I picked mine up, I must have inhaled whilst wiping my mouth because my nostrils were suddenly filled with a more than familiar smell. I stopped, completely shocked. I inhaled again, and there it was, unmistakably familiar. I spent five minutes sniffing like an idiot because I really couldn't place the smell. All I knew was that I really liked it, that I'd definitely smelt it before and that it made me feel a weird mixture of happiness and sadness.

Finally, I realised that the napkin smelled exactly like the washing powder my gran used.

*Marcel Proust - Swann's Way