The Christmas tree is gone. I mourn its passing. Under the railway bridge where we bought it, from a man shivering with cold, I can still pick up the faint smell of Christmas, from the heaps of old pine needles and assorted branches left lying about in the area marked out by his Christmas tree stand. But at home it is all over and I must seek other diversions.

All through the Christmas season I was enchanted by the scent of pine needles. Opening the door into the living-room first thing in the morning, on my way into the kitchen in pursuit of the day’s first life-saving cup of tea, I was arrested by the subtle aroma of our Christmas tree. I would bend down, sentimentally, and switch on the lights. Immediately a soft warm glow would appear in my life and in my heart! Not for me those sleek, sophisticated trees all decked out in silver tinsel and brilliant, but chilling, points of white light – no, for me, it has to be colour! I would sip my mug of tea and contemplate the richness of the little red, blue, green and amber lights that diffused their soft warm glow into the room and made the red and gold tinsel and the assorted baubles sparkle with light and colour.

This morning a new and delicious scent hits my nostrils! As I gaze out of the window at the depressing snow-covered wilderness that in summer I like to call my garden, a waft of hyacinth sweeps over me from the windowsill and I am simultaneously comforted by a moment’s anticipation of spring and transported back a few decades to my childhood home.

They say tastes and smells are the most powerfully evocative means of memory recall. As a student of literature in times past I discovered that this ploy is often used by writers to convey a sense of atmosphere and to transport the narrator and his/her readers back into another place and another time. Most famously, the French author, Marcel Proust, used the tasting of a morsel of cake (known as a madeleine) to immediately plunge us into a whole series of reminiscences that take up seven volumes of his semi-autobiographical novel: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time). Alain-Fournier similarly uses the powerful smell of onions to send his narrator, Francois Seurel, off on a long reverie about the adventures to which he was a partial witness in the life of his childhood friend, Meaulnes, whose name gives rise to the title (‘Le Grand Meaulnes’) of the book I studied (painfully) for French ‘A’ level.

There is no doubt that smells have associations – some good, some bad! For me the smell of hyacinths each year takes me back to memories of the yearly ritual performed by my father. Every year he would painstakingly buy bulbs, unearth the old blue and white bowls he always used for the task, and plant the various bulbs deep in the earth. These would be covered in newspaper and carefully placed, away from the light, for a period of some weeks in the cupboard under the stairs. After Christmas, when all the fuss had died down, we would enter another season and he would proudly bring out his bowls of bulbs, placing them in the light on warm windowsills around the house. Then we would wait. Each year he tended them carefully and attempted to bring them into full flower for my mother’s birthday on January 21st. Mostly, each year, he would fail and the wretched bulbs would lay stubbornly dormant the whole month, showing signs of life around the beginning of February and bursting into flower for my birthday a few days later! In my mind, hyacinths are always connected with my father and with birthdays.

The scent of pine needles; coloured Christmas tree lights; mugs of tea; the smell of hyacinths – I have already mentioned a number of my favourite things. Whiskers on kittens are not my personal favourite, nor bright copper kettles, but in this current winter weather, warm woollen mittens might just be there quite high up on my list. We all, not just Julie Andrews, have our favourite things, which was what made her song so appealing. In the past I have listened to Desert Island Discs and wondered what I would take with me should the unimaginable happen. However, what about Desert Island Smells? In November I made a large Christmas Pudding – I am such a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas! I stored it out in our nice cold garden shed, in a mouse-proof cupboard (I’m not that generous to wildlife!) and left it to mature. However, before leaving it there I couldn’t resist taking the lid off just one more time and plunging my nose into it, inhaling deeply. That glorious smell of Christmas pud! It is definitely an acquired taste and most non-British people have not acquired it, but for me it is heaven and I thought as I stood there, breathing in deeply, that if Desert Island Smells were ever invented that would be top of my list!

Please feel free to send in your thoughts and your own personal list of favourite aromas to the editor@theHagueOnLine.com. We’d love to hear them!

Julie

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