Summer is the sluttiest time for scent lovers
And why, on the morning of a new government, we should try to stop and smell the roses
I pass a cluster of jasmine stars creeping up the limbs of a tree, they reeks of bodies and sherbert. Sweet peas plucked from the veg patch are regal in their purple velvet coats, but smell naive, like honey on white bread and girlhood.
At the bus stop a young person with a single silver earring hanging from their ear, smokes a roll-up, the gentle curls of smoke smell like golden hay. The second-hand nicotine stirs a longing for bad decisions, and nights without any consideration of the next day. I haven’t rolled one in 12 years, and even then, I was a fair-weather smoker, mostly there for the aesthetics and chats outside the club. I consider walking into the village shop and buying a packet of tobacco and papers, and then I remember who I am.
There’s burnt coffee from the deli, rank honeysuckle, Georgian drains, foal and deep. Someone across the valley has put manure on their meadow and the neighbour’s bacon.
Summer captures all the scents and frames them in the motionless air; those smells hold the memories. In Britain, where a lifetime’s balmy nights and hot mornings can be counted on your fingers and toes, it’s easy to loop back in, drop a stitch in time and arrive neatly at a moment in 2007. That moment, (the one you thought you had gotten over years ago) spreads across your cheeks like a painful blush. All that, from just one skank jasmine flower, overripe and rude in its last gasps of bloom.
The other morning, in those few precious minutes, after the school run is done, and you have to be on the Big Screen, I saw a woman jogging, well running really. She had her phone strapped to her arm, it pumped out hectic angry music, with voices altered by computers. The type of music I don’t get and don’t mind that I don't get, because it's not for me.
She had a dog on a lead. The dog looked tired. She had the dog’s shit in a bag, it was swinging round and round in her hand as she ran. The street stank in her manic wake. She trailed the faecal notes behind her like an olfactory warning.
Why couldn’t the running women stop and put the shit in the bin? Or concentrate on walking the dog, and not squeeze a run in too? Why did she need the music? Was the dog, and the run, and shit in a bag not enough to fill her?
I wanted to hold her tight, rock her back and forth as I do to my youngest daughter, when she’s in danger of having a tantrum. I wanted to shake her wrist until she dropped the shit in a bag, hold her face and say: ‘You don’t need to do it all at once, you don’t need to do any of it, no one will know’.
There was an election today. I woke up early and turned on the TV. The window was open, and the garden and gentle rain smelt like dry bergamot in a cup of Earl Grey. It was so beautiful and unexpected, it made me cry. I breathed it in and breathed it out. A foreign feeling, something like relief moved through my body, so I grabbed my phone, made some manic plans, and drank a strong coffee to push the calm feeling away.
I may not be the running woman, but I’ve been on guard for so long, that I’m not sure I know how to lower my shoulders anymore. But I will try, and so should you. It’s nearly the weekend, summer at last, and after fourteen years, we’ve got a new government. So let’s all breathe out. and if only for a moment, stop and try to smell the roses.