Passions: Perfume and the evocative power of smell

Follow your nose and it will lead you to your favourite places

Perfumes, such as Jo Loves, can lead you to your favourite places. Pic: J Christie

Perfumes, scent, fragrance, I’m never happier than when I’m nosing a bottle, sniffing out the top, middle and base notes.

At a fragrance experience organised by Jo Loves, involving 16 different samples served up tapas style and in steaming tagines and foaming in martini glasses, my senses were seduced by an amber, bergamot and lime concoction. Inspired by founder Jo Malone’s visit to a luxury car event it’s all ‘1920s glamour, vintage cars, champagne and picnics in estate gardens while the setting warm summer sun cast an amber glow’. Yes, bottle that and I’m in.

Later as the scent still wafted around me it set me off on a Proustian journey of favourite smells that led back to an old checked shirt that’s travelled with me through the decades, never washed, never worn. It belonged to my dad who died in 1983 and I like to think that somewhere inside its dusty aroma a scent of him lingers still.

Billy Connolly once told me a woman approached him after a show and standing in front of him asked if he knew who she was and hugged him. When he smelled the back of her neck he knew it was the mother who had left him when he was a child.

That immediate recognition is testament to the primal power of our sense of smell. It’s the reason I’ve never put my dad’s shirt through a spin cycle. Its smell, however faint or imaginary, still has the power to evoke memories that make me smile.

What did my dad smell like? On Saturday mornings it would be the bacon rolls he’d cooked, followed by the Scotch pies he bought us at the football, that night when he came in it might be a whiff of cigarette or cigar smoke. On work days it would be soap, shoe polish, chalk, the Brylcreem holding back his wayward curls, the Old Spice I’d bought him for Christmas (he wasn’t a Denim kind of guy). In summer it would be sweat mixed with vanilla from ice-creams dripped as he carried them from the van or roses he’d cut for my mother, on rainy days the wet wool of his overcoat.

I can’t see any perfume house reproducing essence of my dad but that’s OK, because I have a shirt with a scent that always makes me smile.

Janet Christie is Chief Interviewer and columnist at The Scotsman Magazine