Smells

Smells have an amzing ability to trigger memories: this morning I was riding into work and passed a road crew repairing the road surface. As I passed I got a smell from whatever material it was they were repairing the road with: and it smelled to me like caps for toy guns.

This led to an immediate flashback to when I was a kid, playing games that would involve using rolls and rolls of caps and cheap cap guns. After a while of course I realised that shooting one cap at a time from a gun was too slow and so moved onto bashing the caps 2 or 3 at a time with rocks. This also became a bit frustrating after a while, and so the final step was to just set the whole roll of caps on fire and watching them all go off in a few seconds, like a Chinese firecracker. This fascination with watching things burn remained until the regrettable incident years later involving an electric bar fire, some tissue paper, and a large burn mark in the carpet.

The sense of smell seems to be an overlooked sense, coming 3rd in the list after the glamourous senses of sight and hearing but it is another sense so can people lose their sense of smell like they can lose their hearing and sight? I wear glasses, and a combination of lousy genes and a history of Van Halen on headphones will probably cause my hearing to go in the future, but could I lose my smell too? Do strong smells ruin your sense of smell like loud noises damage your ears? If so I suppose I'd better lay off the Stilton and chorizo sandwiches, as my sense of smell may be all I have left in later life...