It was the smell of Elnett that did it to me. One moment I was a fiftysomething male. The next, I was a four-year-old boy again. It was just before the start of a live show and I was in the backstage dressing room, staring at myself in the mirror. I concluded my never less than ludicrous hair looked tonight like it had been styled courtesy of me stuffing my wet fingers into a plug socket. Something had to be done. Which was when I spotted the can of Elnett, left behind by a previous performer. I damped down my so-called hairstyle, and went to work setting it in place.
The intensity of the smell of the hair lacquer took me by surprise. It was bitter and acrid in a way which catches at the back of the throat, but also heavily perfumed as though trying to hide its true industrial nature. It was the smell of my mother, just before she went out for the night; it was the smell of the adult world, of glamour and also of something else. Abandonment would be too strong a word for it, but certainly disappointment would do the job. I was once again the small child standing in my parent’s room watching and smelling the finishing touches being put in place, before she left me to the casual indifference of the babysitter.
It’s fitting that it should have happened at this time of year because, frankly, Christmas stinks. There is no other time of the year so completely enveloped by smells. It is wistfulness in three dimensions which, as winter darkness closes in, transports us. We gasp and sigh at the twinkly lights. We find a place in our souls for kitsch. But it’s the seasonal smells which really hammer away. Certainly, they hammer away at me. Awakened by the olfactory punch of Elnett I have become like Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the foundling antihero of Patrick Suskind’s magnificent novel Perfume, who navigates his way through 18th-century French society courtesy of a talent for identifying aromas.
These are the weeks of clove and cinnamon, of ginger and booze-soaked fruit. It’s not all universally pleasant. That the right mix of spices can take me to the cheery thought of a boiling pot of wine, mulled because throwing dried bits of tree bark into substandard wine we wouldn’t dare touch at any other time of year, makes a twisted kind of sense. But if the scent of cinnamon is too artificial, too much like something engineered to mask the smell of a public toilet, suddenly I am wafted to the lobby of a high-end hotel in Dubai. It is the weeks just before Christmas a decade ago, and I am assailed by the memory of feeling so very out of place and so terribly far from home.
There is science to explain all this. Apparently, the same part of our brain which recognises smells also stores our emotional responses. It’s designed this way to tell us whether what we are smelling is something we need be scared of or not.
It’s useful to know how it works, but that doesn’t describe the personal impact of smelling, say, the virtuous interplay of smoked, cured pig and its clove-studded treacle glaze, in the moments before the ham leaves the oven. It doesn’t describe the hit of dried sage used in a stuffing, or the sickly-sweetness inside a tin of Quality Street when you prise the lid off. Indeed, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christmas really isn’t about family, or presents, or food. It’s all about the smells. Now do excuse me. I’ve got to go and snort some more hairspray.
