Opinion

Jake O'Kane: I just love the smell of burning tyres in the morning - and turf fires, Old Spice and Jeyes Fluid...

Scents are like magic carpets, transporting me to times, places and people long gone...

Jake O'Kane

Jake O'Kane

Jake is a comic, columnist and contrarian.

The sweet smell of a turf fire immediately transports Jake back to his childhood and his Granny's house high in the Sperrins.
The sweet smell of a turf fire immediately transports Jake back to his childhood and his Granny's house high in the Sperrins. The sweet smell of a turf fire immediately transports Jake back to his childhood and his Granny's house high in the Sperrins.

SOME scientists believe time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit travelling faster than the speed of light such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes and Alcubierre drives.

While that may be theory, certain smells are guaranteed to transport me back decades. All of us carry around a suitcase of such odours; here are a few of mine.

The smell of damp clothes brings me back to attending Mass with my Granny in the late 1960s, before clothes with man-made materials were the norm. Granny's house was so high up in the Sperrins it couldn't, at the time, be connected to the electricity grid. Each day ended with the smell of paraffin oil as Tilley lamps emitted their distinct pop on being lit. The gas lights on the wall fascinated me with their wafer-thin mantles – more delicate than butterfly wings – which could still, phoenix-like, survive the searing heat to burn bright.

At the time I didn't notice any smell from the turf fires, having become nose blind to them. It took me to leave the country and return before turf's unique sweet smell revealed itself.

Having moved back into the city, a new set of distinct scents became imprinted in my memory. The possessor of what my mother described as a 'weak chest', Vicks VapoRub became my daily scent. Each morning, before school, she coated me in a thick layer of the stuff, emitting so strong a pong birds fell dead from the sky as I passed, and the unfortunate boy sitting beside me in school spent the day with tears streaming down his face.

Those rare nights when my parents went out were marked by the smell of the hair products needed to construct the then fashionable hairstyles – a beehive for my mum and an Elvis Presley flick for my dad. One sniff of either hair spray or Brylcreem is a time machine transporting me back to 1968.

At the bottom of New Lodge Road where we lived sat Gallaher's factory. Built in 1897 and stretching over a 10-acre site it was, in its day, the biggest tobacco manufacturing plant in the world. Passing on a hot summer's day, you were enveloped in the sickly-sweet odour of bales of untreated tobacco not long picked from fields in the US.

But the most prevalent smell of the 1970s, and what I'd describe as Belfast's scent, was the acrid odour of burning tyres. Not a day passed where fingers of black smoke from burning cars or small street barricades didn't reach into the sky. The smell stuck not only in your nose but also to your clothes, so much so that, as with the turf, I eventually became nose-blind to it.

Having spent months in hospital due to a spinal injury, I also know hospitals have their own unique smell, a mix of sterilising fluid, pumped oxygen mixed with bottles of pee and the sweat of the ill and overworked staff.

Thankfully, there were other, nicer smells, which bring back happier memories. The smell of a hot water bottle being placed in my bed on a cold winter night. The smell of cheap pine disinfectant and stale beer and I'm returned to my dad's pub in the morning before opening. And to those a multitude of others I never think of until, like a hound dog, I pick up their scent: TCP, Jeyes Fluid, burning newspaper lighting the coal fire; talcum powder and soaps such as Imperial Leather, Pears, carbolic and Wright's Coal Tar; stewed tea, linseed oil used in window putty, lavender furniture polish and aftershaves such as Old Spice, Brut and sandalwood. All these scents are like magic carpets, transporting me to times, places and people long gone.

Strangely, a pleasant memory may be imprinted even with an unpleasant smell and vice versa. For instance, I happen to like the smell of burning tyres, as it brings me back to happy days playing with friends. Conversely, anything resembling Blue Stratos aftershave from the 1980s repulses me as that's what I had in my wash bag when in hospital, and so I associate it with sickness and pain.

The significance of fragrance has been understood for millennia, playing a role in the rites of passage both in life and death. Even today, the burning of frankincense has an important symbolic place in the Catholic Church's funeral service.

As for me, well, I just love the smell of burning tyres in the morning.