Madeleine

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Whilst recovering in a darkened room from an impending migraine attack this morning, I smelt a familiar but long-lost smell. At first I thought it was a neurological artefact accompanying the 'halo', but soon realised that it issued from the piles of recently disturbed copies of 'Model Engineer' magazines that I've mentioned before - an enormous collection that I inherited, well adopted, after my Dad died - they would have been pulped by now had they not been taken on board, their fate still yet to be decided.

This 'olfactory anomaly' was in fact the particular odour of the house I grew up in, tobacco residue and all, and just as the installation of my Dad's lathe in the studio has imbued that space with a redolence of our shed and latterly cellar at Winson Street: machine oil, cutting suds etc., it took me straight back to my early youth. Proust was not wrong - the merest taste or smell or sound can evoke more than ten-thousand words ever can: truly the mark of us as humans.

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