Smell is powerfully evocative but sadly we’ve become a planet of nasal wimps. From Asian fish markets to black Africa, now’s the time to follow your nose.
Paris used to smell of bakers, pissoirs, pastis and dark tobacco. It was as alluring and decadent a scent as a city could wear. It was a nasal, atonal clarion; all the right notes – greed, taste, appetite, abandon, sex, philosophy and decay. If they made scented candles out of the air de Paris 1968, I’d burn them. It’s the tobacco that was the unique addition. Lots of places have got piss-and-booze, but nowhere else has that absolutely distinctive smell of French cigarettes. You’d get off the train at the Gare du Nord and walk through the station and there it would be, snaking through the concourse. Eddies of it would catch the back of your throat; one of the most alluring and evocative smells ever invented, like wood and burnt nuts and spice, a sweet-sour smell. Just gorgeous.
I smoked for 30 years, and for most of them I smoked untipped Gitanes or Gauloises or froggies. Smoking them was like inhaling bottlebrushes, but the smell never stopped being nasal foreplay. Clothes and hair that smell of old blonde Marlboro are disgusting. The smell of morning-after Gitanes is a pheromone, an aphrodisiac that makes you want to nuzzle. Every subliminal-wannabe-implied-sophisticated lie that the advertising industry tried to roll into a fag paper was actually true about froggies. They really were the essence of existentialism and beatniks and tousled beds and the four-o’clock philosophy that ends in tears and kisses. It was the smell of a shrug and the atmosphere of the greatest street-side catwalk in the world.
I couch all this in the past tense because the last factory making dark tobacco cigarettes in France has just closed down. This isn’t just the end of an era, it’s the end of a whole slice of human possibility, a whole gossamer tear of existence wiped away. It’s an extinction that’s to be mourned far more than some sweaty rainforest, frightening oversized cat or wrinkly big pig with a horn in its nose. The death of froggies is heartbreaking, and I’m responsible. I used to do it and now I don’t. I stopped French-kissing French fags and I don’t care how that sounds.
All the smells of old Paris have gone now. No one drinks pastis, the bakeries are all out-of-town conglomerates, the pissoirs went years ago. And it’s not just Paris that smells of bland-city. All over the world, the urban scent has been wiped off the olfactory map. Nothing smells of anything anymore. It’s not just bad smells, but all smells. Restaurants don’t smell of food. Look at the extractor fans in a modern kitchen: they look like the warp drive of the Starship Enterprise. We are beginning to associate natural random free-floating scent with dirt and disease and an uncontrolled atmosphere. It’s the control and manipulation of our environment that’s eradicating a whole sense; for us, perhaps, the most important sense, certainly our most vulnerable one.
Our sense of smell, which is closely aligned to taste, is lodged in the oldest bit of our brains. It’s older than language, older than opposable thumbs. It’s older than standing on two feet. It’s the bit of our head we share with the dinosaurs. Consequently, smell is the most evocative of our senses. It can spring surges of déjà vu on us, resurrect affairs and Christmases past, and make dead people rise again. Smell is as close as we can get to living on our instincts. It makes you feel without an intervening thought. And we’re rubbing them all out as fast as we can, and replacing them with a sort of man-made easy-smell compilation odour.
We cover ourselves with chemical imitations of safe musk and plastic flowers, the air is filled with the toilet-wipe scent of pine and lemon and the childish reassurance of cinnamon and cedar. We have had a whole invisible environment stripped away and polluted with the smell of the suburbs. This is most serious with food. Smell has become less and less an element of taste. There are things that Western children now believe have no natural odour at all: milk, eggs, chicken, potatoes, carrots, beef. They don’t trust the real smell of citrus or strawberries, cheese, mushrooms; they prefer the chemically processed ones. The world can be split into all sorts of halves, haves and have-nots. But here is a new source of division: smell. And we in the rich half are the ones who are the have-nots. A fifth of our physical world is being atomised. We are becoming nasal wimps. All new or strong smells seem bad or unpleasant. We’ve forgotten how to be adventurous and brave with our noses; we no longer follow them. Smell is now the most striking difference between them and us.
I think you should start getting your hooter into shape. You should factor smell into your travel plans. You should seek out freshness and decay, the ancient and the freshly laid. Here are four grand smells everyone should get up their noses before they die: a North African souk; an Asian fish market at dawn; durian fruit; an Ethiopian church. The best and most evocative of all smells is of black Africa. Sweat, goat fat, charcoal smoke and red dust. It’s the finest smell in the world: take a deep breath, jump in.