A smell that returns a whole year to you at once

Nothing else retrieves a period of your life so completely, so quickly, or with so little warning.

It is never the important smells that do it. Not the ones anybody would nominate. It is cut grass in a particular heat, or the inside of an old book, or a cleaning product nobody makes anymore, and the year arrives whole, complete with its weather and its worries and the shape of the rooms you were in. There is no gradual assembly. It is there before you have identified what you are smelling, and by the time you name it the feeling is already fading. The order of operations is strange and quite consistent.

You cannot plan for this, which is part of what makes it worth writing about. Nobody can arrange to be ambushed. What you can do is recognise the ambush when it happens rather than shaking it off and continuing, which is the usual response because it tends to occur in the middle of something else, in a corridor or a car park. Standing still for a moment when it happens is not a technique. It is just the difference between having the experience and half having it.

The years that come back this way are rarely the ones that seemed significant. Ordinary stretches return: a particular winter of no consequence, a job you did for eight months, a flat you were not especially happy in. There is something quietly reassuring in that. It suggests the unremarkable parts of a life are stored just as thoroughly as the rest, and are available, occasionally, without being asked for.