health and fitness: ‘I’ve been told bacon smells lovely’

samedi 26 mars 2016

‘I’ve been told bacon smells lovely’ – life without a sense of smell

Spring is in the air and you can’t smell a thing: no flowers, no Sunday roast, no chocolate. What’s life like for anosmics?

It’s a bright, crisp morning and you walk to work through the park. Banks of creamy-gold narcissi are out and you can hear birdsong. The joggers seem to be running faster than they were a month ago, as if the spring light has given their feet extra bounce. You know there is something special in the air, but you can’t fully grasp it. “Don’t you love spring?” a colleague asks when you arrive at the office. You don’t like to admit that, no, you don’t love spring, any more than you love Christmas or autumn or summer. The passing seasons are almost meaningless to you.

Those who lack a sense of smell – the technical term is anosmia – are cut off from a thousand small joys that the rest of us depend on. It is deeply disorienting. When the American food writer Marlena Spieler lost her sense of smell after a head injury from a car accident five years ago, she no longer recognised herself. When I first met her, years before the accident, Spieler was obsessed with the minutiae of different food smells. She is the author of more than 20 cookbooks and we used to have long conversations about how dried mint smelled different from fresh, or the perfume of various citrus fruits. Now she could not so much as smell her morning coffee, never mind tell if it was a good cup. Cooking and writing about food had been her identity for decades, and now it was “as if I had ceased to exist”. She hated being this new person, someone who couldn’t tell if there were lemons in the kitchen. She would ask close friends, “Do I seem like myself? Am I acting like myself?”