Evocative sights and smells

The smell of the Yorkshire puddings in the oven as the Billy Cotton Band show signature tune is playing on the radio.

KatyK yes, tar! On a hot day, when little hands can prod the warm tar bubbles at the edge of the road [there were hardly any cars on our road so it was fairly safe.]And ditto for the pipe tobacco that my Grandad smoked, it smelled wonderful. Candles in church. Roses in the garden, although my own roses now hardly have any perfume at all sadly.Mown grass on a warm day.The salty tang of the sea.

Moth balls. Cigar smoke and pipe tobacco. Roasting coffee. Old Spice. Beer froth. Sizzling bacon, fish and chip shops...

Tar - I can remember the roads near us being tarred and the sight of a steam roller lumbering down the road a few days later to smooth it out. That steam roller seemed so exciting to us as kids.

The smell and the sound of a coal fire, the fire in the back room was the only heat in the house.
The smell of Murray mints reminds me of my nan, she would always have one or two loose in the handbag that hardly ever left her side.
Pipe tobacco, which you don't often smell these days. Dear dad loved his pipe.

Slightly off subject, but the gentle, relaxing sound of grass being mowed with a manual lawnmower.

Whenever I walk past a conifer hedge I feel as if I am 5 years old and staying at my aunts house in the New Forest, and then there is the sight and smell of the heather. Happy days!

Frangipani, I spent part of my childhood in the Far East and the smell of frangipani transports right back there.

The smell of freshly washed clothes being ironed reminds me of my mother. (Not a smell experienced in my house unless the ironing fairy has been!)

Lavender is my grandmother, Tabac aftershave my FiL, and the smell of a small, sweaty little boy takes me back to being a young mum.

- “...more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and flavour are still long...,.and bear unfaltering, in their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory”

Good old Proust.

If ever I smell whatever sort of polish it is that they used on the wooden floors at school gives me that start-of-a-new-term frisson.