The Archaeology of Smell
There’s a particular scent that haunts me.
There’s a particular scent that haunts me.
Not in a sinister way, though I suppose all hauntings carry a bit of weight, don’t they? It’s the smell of turpentine and poster paint mingling with teenage anxiety. Takes me straight back to Mr Lee’s art class, 1974, when I was fourteen and absolutely convinced I couldn’t draw for shit.
The thing is, I couldn’t draw for shit. Still can’t. But that smell, Christ, it’s a time machine.
I was thinking about this the other day because it happened again. Walked past a bloke doing up his fence with some sort of wood treatment, and boom, I’m back in that classroom, sitting next to Sandra Mitchell (name changed for anonymity purposes), whom I fancied but would never speak to, trying to make my still life of three apples look less like three potatoes having an existential crisis.
We don’t talk enough about smell, do we?
Vision gets all the glory. Photographs, films, and Instagram feeds are carefully curated to within an inch of their manufactured lives. Hearing comes second—songs that remind us of summers, voices we haven’t heard in years that still echo. But smell? Smell is the outcast sense, the weird one that gets overlooked until it punches you in the face with a memory so vivid you forget where you are for a moment.
The Norwegian Pines
Autumn does something strange to me. Always has. There’s a particular quality to the air when September bleeds into October, that earthy dampness, the decomposition of summer, the sharpness of pine needles breaking down. And every single year, without fail, I’m four years old again, living in a small town in rural Norway (Dad was posted there as part of a Cold War Royal Signals Army Team).
I don’t have many concrete memories from that age. Most of what I “remember” is probably just family stories I’ve heard so many times they’ve calcified into false memory. But the smell? That’s real. That’s mine.
Walking through those Norwegian forests with my mum, probably boring her senseless with whatever nonsense four-year-olds bang on about. The trees were so tall they seemed to hold up the sky. Or maybe they were normal-sized and I was just small. Either way, when I smell pine in autumn now, I’m there. Completely there. My adult consciousness takes a back seat, and little me is driving for a moment.
It’s unsettling and comforting in equal measure.
The Ones We Don’t Talk About
Here’s where it gets heavier, and I promise I’m not trying to be dramatic. But you asked about memories that make us human, and humans aren’t just made of art classes and Norwegian forests.
There’s a smell I encounter less frequently, thank God, but when I do, it stops me cold. Cordite. Burnt powder. That acrid, metallic smell that comes after you’ve discharged a weapon on the range.
Royal Air Force days. Twenty-something Dominus, who thought he had the world figured out and very much did not. I wasn’t in combat roles, let’s be clear about that, but weapons training was mandatory, and the smell of the range is... distinctive.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you: these smell-memories don’t ask permission. They don’t wait for you to be in the right headspace or ready to process them. They just arrive, like an uninvited guest who brought their own ghosts along for company.
I’m not traumatised by that particular memory; it wasn’t a traumatic experience. But it’s complex. It reminds me of a version of myself I’m not entirely sure I understand anymore. Young, certain about things I’m now uncertain about, wearing a uniform that represented something I believed in, but have since often contemplated.
That’s what smell does. It doesn’t give you the edited highlights reel. It gives you the raw footage, complete with all the contradictions and complications we usually file away in the “don’t think about it” drawer.
Why This Matters (And Why We Should Write It Down)
So why am I banging on about this? Why should you care about my paint fumes and pine trees and existential weapon smells?
Because your smell memories are just as important as mine. They’re just as weird and specific and impossibly you. And they’re disappearing.
Not the memories themselves, those will probably stick around, bobbing to the surface whenever the right scent triggers them. But the record of them. The deliberate act of pinning them down, examining them, understanding what they mean and why they matter.
We take photographs to remember what things looked like. We record voices, save playlists, and bookmark songs. But how do you preserve the smell of your grandmother’s kitchen? The specific cocktail of her perfume and whatever she was baking, and the slightly musty smell of her house that you’d recognise anywhere?
You can’t. Not really.
But you can write about it.
You can say: “When I smell cinnamon and old lavender, I’m eight years old again, sitting at Gran’s kitchen table, learning to play rummy while she pretended I wasn’t cheating.”
And suddenly it’s not just preserved, it’s shared. Someone reading that might not know your gran or her kitchen or even what lavender smells like mixed with cinnamon. But they’ll recognise the shape of that memory because they have their own version. Their own grandmother’s kitchen. Their own smell-memory that transports them.
Digital Paper (LOL)
Let’s talk about “digital paper perhaps lol” and yes, exactly that.
Look, I’m as nostalgic as the next middle-aged bloke (call myself middle-aged but probably classified as an old git moreso) who remembers when the internet made that dial-up sound, but I’m not going to pretend physical paper has some sort of moral superiority. Write it in Notes on your phone at 2 am when the memory hits. Type it into a Google Doc. Start a private blog nobody else will ever read. Email it to yourself with the subject line “Weird memory from today” and let it sit there forever.
The medium doesn’t matter. The act of recording it does.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re all walking archives of experiences that will disappear when we do. Every smell-memory, every moment of being transported back in time, every strange trigger that makes us who we are, it all goes dark eventually.
But it doesn’t have to disappear completely. Not if we write it down.
Not so that other people can necessarily understand, though they might. But so we can look at these moments ourselves and say, “Oh, right, that’s who I am. That’s where I’ve been. That turpentine-scented teenager and that four-year-old in Norway and that uncertain twenty-something on the weapons range, they’re all still here. They’re all still me.”
An Invitation (Not an Order)
So here’s what I’m suggesting, not because I’m some guru of memory preservation but because I’m just as desperate to hold onto this stuff as you are:
Start keeping a smell diary. Not every day, Christ, that would be exhausting and a bit weird. But when it happens. When a smell knocks you sideways and suddenly you’re somewhere else, somewhen else, write it down.
Where were you? What did you smell? Where did it take you? Who were you in that memory? Who are you now? What’s changed? What hasn’t?
It doesn’t need to be profound. It doesn’t need to be publishable or shareable or Instagram-worthy. It just needs to be true.
Because these memories, these strange, scent-triggered time-travel moments, they’re not just random neurological fireworks. They’re the connective tissue between who we were and who we are. They’re proof that our past selves aren’t dead, just dormant, waiting for the right smell to wake them up again.
And yeah, sometimes that’s uncomfortable. Sometimes you don’t want to be reminded of the person you were or the things you did or the certainties you held that have since crumbled.
But it’s yours. Your specific, strange, human experience of moving through time while dragging all your previous selves behind you like some sort of emotional conga line.
Write it down.
On paper, on digital paper (lol), on your phone, in a voice memo, carved into a tree for all I care.
Just don’t let it disappear without a trace.
You’re more interesting than you think you are. Your memories, even the weird ones triggered by fence treatment on a Wednesday afternoon, matter more than you realise.
And thirty years from now, when something smells like whatever you’re smelling today, you’ll be grateful you took a moment to capture it.
Trust me on that one.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go smell some turpentine and cry about teenage me’s inability to draw apples.
What are your thoughts?
What are your experiences of similar?
One thing I am doing at the moment is connecting with authors with a similar mindset and who want their work “everywhere”…via my personal blog Dominus Markham, I have started to create a reviews section, and if any of you would like to feature there, keeping in mind I use around 27 Social Media Profiles to promote anything on my blog…DROP ME A LINE…
Until Next Time
