Fragrant scents and pungent odours play tricks with our memories, and before you can say gruesome gruel I’m back at my nan’s on Saturday nights. Enamel crock on the bareboard table – nan was never one for fuss – cutlery strewn around, and a nasal assault of fish stew. I can still taste the gagging concoction, swallowed under threat of a clipped ear.  The reward, though, was Harry Lauder, my Scottish nan’s biggest fan, belting out Keep Right On To  the End of the Road on the old wind-up gramophone.   

Another shock to my nasal system, during a Scottish childhood, was a visit to the roadman’s tarry bucket. Wherever there was need for grit and tar the roadie would be there, bending over his bubbling coalation like an old-time medicine man.  I doubt whether my mam thought the roadman could work miracles, but she truly believed his boiling black tar would cure my whooping cough.  My recall doesn’t stretch to be cured of the whoops, but oh that smell.

If oil prices keep rising we could all be out of our cars and riding trams, trains and busses. One thing’s certain, there won’t be the nicotine odours I remember.  Everyone smoked then, or so it seemed, and the smell was worse than a load of slurry.  But how would you fancy such a pong, and others a lot more fragrant, being chemically preserved?

Scientists are proving this is  possible by placing different scents in a modern form of aspic.  The results are already being passed to international companies producing everything from scarves to scatter cushions, drapes, dresses, and shoes  And if you’ve been wondering how that delicious aroma of newly baked bread could be drawing you into the supermarket, when the loaves are nowhere near, now you know.

Check out that new blouse you’ve just bought, with the nose tingling hint of a perfume almost forgotten, and you’re back in the days of ill-spent youth, rocking to Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones.  There’s no end to other scents that will have your past living easily with the present: ties high on lager, curtains teasing the nosebuds with a drift of roses, and shoes with a whiff of heather and moss.

In my memory there was a time when houses smelled strongly of mansion polish and carbolic, with no such luxury as a Floral Bouquet spray. There was a place, though, where you could give your nosebuds a treat for a few pence. While cheering on Roy Rogers and Trigger, and being stunned into silence at the gyrations of Carmen Miranda, you breathed in the ripeness of strawberry deodorant, sprayed by the cinema staff. 

There are memories in my head that could never be simulated on ties or scarves: steam spiraling from a sea of suds in the old stone boiler, and the nose pinching tartness of apple as it dripped through the jelly bag into the copper kettle. 

All this makes me wonder which aromas today’s youth will want preserved in aspic: chicken curries, kebabs, or trainers that pong of rotted compost?             

One thing’s certain.  It won’t be my nan’s fish stew on Saturday nights.