Perfume Pilgrim

When sweetened lard and chocolate taste the same and scent eludes you! A moving interview with a generous anosmic friend,  who shares her experience of a odourfree life  after a car accident.

Q: When did you realise you lost your sense of smell?

YR: It happened after a serious accident in which I sustained a head injury. It was after I returned from the hospital and the first thing I noticed was that nothing I ate had any taste. With time I realized that neither my sense of smell nor taste were functioning anymore and that it was possibly permanent if the torn nerves did not repair within 16 years.

Q: Did you start intentionally smelling things to check?

YR Randall: yes, I had a collection of essential oils which I would sniff but I could smell nothing.

Q: What about bad smells?

YR : I couldn’t smell anything at all because the information simply wasn’t getting to my brain. I remember once waiting to cross the road and a large vehicle was passing and giving off a lot of fumes and I felt I could smell them. I think it was nothing more than a flashback to the accident. It only lasted a brief moment.

Q: Did friends come up with smells to test you with, or did doctors give you any diagnostic tests?

YR: my daughter, who was fourteen at the time, once told me to close my eyes. She then held something under my nose and told me to take a big sniff. I nearly fainted! It was a bottle of nail varnish remover and although I couldn’t smell it, nevertheless I felt the effect. No tests were ever done on me, I wasn’t even told about it. I barely remember my stay in the hospital. I had to do my own research online.

Q: I have some smelling salts. Some athletes, including boxers use them, and a whiff is sufficient to have noses and faces wince. Does Ammonia have an effect on you?

YR: I don’t think I’ve tried smelling it but I am sure it would have an effect on me because it’s the fumes rather than the scent that have the effect.

Q: Do you ever worry about eating rotten food or sour milk, or not smelling food burning?

YR: My smoke alarm was doing overtime to begin with because I was always burning toast! If I drank sour milk I would know it was sour. The sense of taste is a combination of the taste buds and the sense of smell. So, for instance, with my taste buds I can perceive sour, salty, sweet, spicy, and bitter but I don’t perceive any flavour because that’s the job of the nose. If I closed my eyes and ate a sweetened block of lard it would be the same as a bar of chocolate.

The imagination seems to play a role as well as I once discovered when I bought a cup of tea in a cafe. It was extremely bitter and undrinkable so I asked for another cup. It was just as bitter, and then I suddenly remembered that I had asked for coffee, not tea. Once I realized I was drinking coffee it became drinkable. Extraordinary!

Q: Do you ever dream of smells now?

YR: No, I don’t dream of smells but a few weeks after the accident I began ’smelling’ the most beautiful scents. I can only assume these were created by my mind, or heaven scent. They were like nothing I had ever smelled before in my life and it was wonderful. This would last for about 10 minutes or so and then fade. It only happens rarely now.

Q: Do you worry about body odour and do you apply perfume?

YR: Yes, it can be easy to forget to wash clothes because your nose is not telling you to. I use a little perfume after checking with friends or my daughters that it suits me. It is amazing how much information comes to us through our noses. Without that information I sometimes have a sense of being disconnected.

Q: There are estimates that the average person can detect over 2.500 odours, do you feel sadness or loss at missing out on this sense?

YR: I’m sorry; the question has made me feel tearful. Yes, it is a great loss but I try not to dwell on it too much. I can even forget that the world has a smell! I think I have to remind myself regularly though so that I realize there is some information I am not getting and act accordingly.

Q: Oh, I am sorry…

YR: no, it is fine.

Q: Helen Keller wrote a lot about her sense of smell as a heightened sense due to her blindness and deafness; do you feel your other senses have become heightened as a result of this loss?

YR: it took me a long time to start cooking intuitively again, without a recipe to hand but now I still love cooking and friends and family love my food, that teaches me the value of intuition and trust. That is something I also thought about a lot. I certainly don’t see any better, too much reading and writing, and my hearing hasn’t changed. Colour has become very important to me though.

Q: and music?

YR: and touch, if I go to the beach I have to go and swish my hands in it and taste the saltiness. I have always loved music but for me it is a very physical thing and I love to respond with my body by dancing.

Q: Any advice for me to make the most of enjoying, appreciating and being grateful for the sense of smell?

YR: Be aware and be thankful for every smell you perceive, good and bad, and also be aware of the information the various scents of the world are giving you, they speak as much as anything else speaks.

Q: Thank you. Please tell me about your favourite perfumes before and what do you wear now?

YR: I used to wear Diorissimo and I think I remember once having a small bottle of Je Rien, I also liked some of the scents from the Body shop such as Tea Rose. I used to make mixes with lavender, geranium, and bergamont - that’s a lovely one. My present perfume is J’Adore. Other favourite scents are the smell of the soil in spring when the sap begins to rise, the smell of the sea, the smell of a babies hair.

Q: Proust wrote about his olfactory memory and how a scent could transport him to the past, do you still carry the memory of for example a rose, coffee or sewage?

YR: It is very difficult for me to remember actual smells very clearly. I think the connection between smell and memory is one of the most difficult things for me. You know how when smell a certain scent and it brings back memories, obviously I don’t have that anymore.

Q: But can memory bring back the smell? I can still remember the smell of boiled cabbage, though it has been years since I smelt it.

YR: That is a fascinating idea. It might be worth trying a kind of memory exercise to see if anything happens. I do sometimes feel that I can almost smell something, when looking at a rose for example, but it eludes me. It’s very faint for me and I’m wondering if the olfactory nerves actually play a direct role in the memory of a smell. As if they were faintly reproducing the smell.

Q: In preparation for our chat I also googled anosmia and came across some interesting sites. Have you ever written about it?

YR: No I haven’t. That has just reminded me of another problem; when I am writing fiction I often forget to describe smells.

Q: When you read fiction that include smell descriptions, is this still enjoyable?  I enjoy reading about odours I have never smelt, as well as the scents I am familiar with.

YR: Yes, it is. Definitely. It is interesting to be talking about this because I am beginning to think that I should pay more attention to the sense of smell in other ways, like dreams, or meditations, or written descriptions. Maybe I need to remind my body that it needs to repair itself. Grow those nerves back together.

Q: I was recently thinking about the concept of  “a story in a word” and was wondering is there the equivalent of a “story in a smell”? You said above that smells speak as much as anything else speaks, please elaborate.

YR: As I was reading the descriptions on your blog I felt there were so many stories that could be told around the theme of scents. But also that scent, or smell, tells its own story. The smell of fear that arises from the body of a person who is threatened; the smell of aftershave on a young man getting ready to meet his girlfriend. Or the smell of animals on a farm, flowers coming into bloom, they tell us what is happening and we can also take them as signs (in the Sufi sense).

Q: Thank you so much, this was beautiful and I feel really touched and inspired.