Saturday, March 17, 2007
What I did on my other holiday: Part 1
Friday afternoon and I'm in a deeply pleasant cafe in Montreal in the coolest part of town (because I'm there). The decor is very 1972 Romanian hotel lobby and with a live dj playing deep house and broken beats it's quite the place to work and to write. A man has just sat down at the table next to me and he smells strongly of eggs.
And he is now ordering eggs.
It's a rare thing these days. In the 1970's, the decade the world has recently decided to euologise as the best ever (the visible world most of us are plugged into being run largely by people in their late 20's to early 40's, it's conveniently just far away enough to misremember), everybody smelled of food products. Everybody.
All Indians smelled of curry, all Frenchmen smelled of garlic and it was common knowledge to every 5-year old who'd never met one that all black people tasted of chocolate. Part of me still believes the first two ( none of me believes the last one thanks to the distinctly flesh-flavoured lips of Fatima from Angola when I was 15) and the only reason that nobody realises any more is because we all eat curry and garlic so we smell of them too. Therefore none of us do. It's, like, a paradox, maan. Leaving aside questionable distinctions of birthright, back in the apparently good old days what on earth did we, the gor-blimey great British public smell like to foreigners? I can't imagine. Probably jam sandwiches if the diet of most of my childhood friends was the norm.
I remember a boy in my primary school who strongly smelled of eggs, several boys who smelled of various cuts of cheap ham and one boy in my secondary school who famously, unashamedly smelled of baked beans. Curiously, though each on their own exuded a disgusting stink to be avoided under any and all circumstances, if they were stood close together in a sweaty gym class the temptation to lick them for breakfast was almost overwhelming. Thank god we didn't have a boy who smelled of ketchup and mustard or there'd have been a sexuality-challenging feeding frenzy and I can personally guarantee at least one case of hidden cold sores
I've known several women whose hair smells range from lightly toasted sugar to darkly roasted wookie, the former a maddeningly alluring smell but sadly not convincing as a last-minute substitute for creme brulee topping when the Vicar and his disarmingly sexual niece drop round unexpectedly for a plate of cheese gossips and a cup of hot suspicion. The Ex-Marriage Module used to say my armpits sometimes smelled of hamburgers. I was so horrified I never asked if she was referring to just the pure all-beef patty or whether the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickled onions in a sesame seed bun was included in that too. I use deodorant now.
update: he's had his eggs and the smell has gone away! Perhaps it's some eggy deficiency in the blood of these descendants of 17th century French criminals, prostitutes and the mentally ill? I should ask.
I often privately bemoan our species' loss of the instinctive, intuitive part of our lives - at least within certain societies - and nowhere is this more obvious than in our changed eating habits. I'm not even talking about the alarming convenience of intensive agriculture and the frustrating inconvenience of the Chicken that has so far failed to evolve into 12 boneless breaded salty nuggets upon maturity and then box itself up for shipping. I'm just making the point that people don't inspect their food before eating anymore, so that when I do I'm thought eccentric. Many's the time I've eaten a meal in good company and as each course arrives in front of me, I dip down to give it a good sniff yet arise to faces of bemused, haughty disapproval. It's partly out of curiosity, so I get a better impression of what I'm about to eat, yet there's surely something deeper involved too: a practise as old as humans themselves, checking out what it is they're about to consume for reasons of safety as much as of taste. The world has always been full of dangerous foodstuffs so it would make sense for us to have evolved this basic reaction (and as we decrease the genetic and seasonal diversity of those generally accepted safe-to-eat foods, aren't we opening up the chances of all going down with the same bird lurgy or whatever?).
update: shame, he left before I could enquire. There's nothing a Frenchman probably appreciates more than an Englishman in cracked french asking him just why he smells. Never mind. I'll ask that rugby player over there in the corner, chewing his hand.
Many years ago, I suggested someone should make a device that allowed you to smell your own bum, a unwieldy steam-powered Victorian brass whirlygig that comes complete with filters, dials, wheels and a fully-illustrated 200-page manual. My brother wryly claiming that whilst it was a good idea, he would prefer to continue with the manual method - ie. using his fingers. We both were joking but now I think there was some truth buried within both of our suggestion. Maybe it's a need to check, again, your own health? We've all taken a crap and felt like there was something wrong (some of us more recently than others). It could be that just as there is an index of stool health, the gloriously named Bristol Stool Scale (I defy you not to laugh at Type 4), there is in our subconscious a dimly glimpsed understanding of healthy-to-unhealthy poo smells.
Today's post was brought to you by our sponsors "Mr Proust's Organic Madeleines", now with 20% more memories and "Fila Brazilia" who invite you to Spill The Beans.
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Friday afternoon and I'm in a deeply pleasant cafe in Montreal in the coolest part of town (because I'm there). The decor is very 1972 Romanian hotel lobby and with a live dj playing deep house and broken beats it's quite the place to work and to write. A man has just sat down at the table next to me and he smells strongly of eggs.
And he is now ordering eggs.
It's a rare thing these days. In the 1970's, the decade the world has recently decided to euologise as the best ever (the visible world most of us are plugged into being run largely by people in their late 20's to early 40's, it's conveniently just far away enough to misremember), everybody smelled of food products. Everybody.
All Indians smelled of curry, all Frenchmen smelled of garlic and it was common knowledge to every 5-year old who'd never met one that all black people tasted of chocolate. Part of me still believes the first two ( none of me believes the last one thanks to the distinctly flesh-flavoured lips of Fatima from Angola when I was 15) and the only reason that nobody realises any more is because we all eat curry and garlic so we smell of them too. Therefore none of us do. It's, like, a paradox, maan. Leaving aside questionable distinctions of birthright, back in the apparently good old days what on earth did we, the gor-blimey great British public smell like to foreigners? I can't imagine. Probably jam sandwiches if the diet of most of my childhood friends was the norm.
I remember a boy in my primary school who strongly smelled of eggs, several boys who smelled of various cuts of cheap ham and one boy in my secondary school who famously, unashamedly smelled of baked beans. Curiously, though each on their own exuded a disgusting stink to be avoided under any and all circumstances, if they were stood close together in a sweaty gym class the temptation to lick them for breakfast was almost overwhelming. Thank god we didn't have a boy who smelled of ketchup and mustard or there'd have been a sexuality-challenging feeding frenzy and I can personally guarantee at least one case of hidden cold sores
I've known several women whose hair smells range from lightly toasted sugar to darkly roasted wookie, the former a maddeningly alluring smell but sadly not convincing as a last-minute substitute for creme brulee topping when the Vicar and his disarmingly sexual niece drop round unexpectedly for a plate of cheese gossips and a cup of hot suspicion. The Ex-Marriage Module used to say my armpits sometimes smelled of hamburgers. I was so horrified I never asked if she was referring to just the pure all-beef patty or whether the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickled onions in a sesame seed bun was included in that too. I use deodorant now.
update: he's had his eggs and the smell has gone away! Perhaps it's some eggy deficiency in the blood of these descendants of 17th century French criminals, prostitutes and the mentally ill? I should ask.
I often privately bemoan our species' loss of the instinctive, intuitive part of our lives - at least within certain societies - and nowhere is this more obvious than in our changed eating habits. I'm not even talking about the alarming convenience of intensive agriculture and the frustrating inconvenience of the Chicken that has so far failed to evolve into 12 boneless breaded salty nuggets upon maturity and then box itself up for shipping. I'm just making the point that people don't inspect their food before eating anymore, so that when I do I'm thought eccentric. Many's the time I've eaten a meal in good company and as each course arrives in front of me, I dip down to give it a good sniff yet arise to faces of bemused, haughty disapproval. It's partly out of curiosity, so I get a better impression of what I'm about to eat, yet there's surely something deeper involved too: a practise as old as humans themselves, checking out what it is they're about to consume for reasons of safety as much as of taste. The world has always been full of dangerous foodstuffs so it would make sense for us to have evolved this basic reaction (and as we decrease the genetic and seasonal diversity of those generally accepted safe-to-eat foods, aren't we opening up the chances of all going down with the same bird lurgy or whatever?).
update: shame, he left before I could enquire. There's nothing a Frenchman probably appreciates more than an Englishman in cracked french asking him just why he smells. Never mind. I'll ask that rugby player over there in the corner, chewing his hand.
Many years ago, I suggested someone should make a device that allowed you to smell your own bum, a unwieldy steam-powered Victorian brass whirlygig that comes complete with filters, dials, wheels and a fully-illustrated 200-page manual. My brother wryly claiming that whilst it was a good idea, he would prefer to continue with the manual method - ie. using his fingers. We both were joking but now I think there was some truth buried within both of our suggestion. Maybe it's a need to check, again, your own health? We've all taken a crap and felt like there was something wrong (some of us more recently than others). It could be that just as there is an index of stool health, the gloriously named Bristol Stool Scale (I defy you not to laugh at Type 4), there is in our subconscious a dimly glimpsed understanding of healthy-to-unhealthy poo smells.
Today's post was brought to you by our sponsors "Mr Proust's Organic Madeleines", now with 20% more memories and "Fila Brazilia" who invite you to Spill The Beans.
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