"Mmm...smells good!" said the nurse as she whipped off the aluminium cover. An egg stared up embarrassedly between the embrace of two succulent sausages.

I sniffed. Sniffed again. Tried several times. I might as well have been trying to smell an ice cube in a glass of water. I got my nose right down to the tray and sniffed with canine intensity. With a vague sense of disquiet I looked up at the nurse whose puzzled eyes had been watching my bloodhound act. "Does it really smell as good as you say, Nurse?" It was hard to admit it. I had lost my sense of smell.

For the preceding three weeks the loss had gone unnoticed. All my interest had been concentrated on the effort to go on living in spite of a sizeable fracture of the skull sustained in a somewhat violent tête-a-tête with Mother Earth. The gradual change from being spoonfed to sitting up and helping myself; the routine of x-rays and injections; the various stages of Operation-B--bed-making, bed-pans and bed-baths; all of this, coupled with a certain lucky-to-be-alive feeling, had delayed the discovery of my missing sense.

That was six months ago and I'm still without my sense of smell, still searching for a word to describe the absence of the God-given faculty without which the rose and the hyacinth are robbed of half their beauty. For the first time I realised that we have no word in English to express the loss of smell, as 'blind' and 'deaf' express the absence of sight and hearing. Perhaps this lacuna reflects the general opinion of people that the loss of smell is not grave enough to merit a name to itself.

My loss is not a major catastrophe, but it is a loss that I feel. I have not yet got accustomed to living in an ordorless, scentless, smell-less world. It has its advantages, I admit. I could spend a day forking silage or cleaning sewers without noticing the stench. But I don't normally engage in that sort of work, and my contacts in the past with nauseating smells were limited to an occasional gust from a stuffed drain or an open dunp. While reckoning my immunity to unpleasant smells on the credit side, I find that it is more than outbalanced by my divorce from a wide range of smell-sensations connected with some of the most enjoyable things in life.

I mentioned roses and hyacinths. I could never resist the impulse to smell a beautiful rose. I would cradle the rich-scented blossom in my hand while inhaling the ethereal essence of its silky petals. A walk in the hospital garden one sunny morning cured me of the habit. Unthinking, I stooped to capture the fragrance of a particularly lovely rose. In one unforgettable moment came the realisation that, for me, the scent of roses would never again be more than a memory. A part of me was dead. Shakespeare's words were painfully applicable:

"You smell this business with a sense as cold
As is a dead man's nose."
     (Winter's Tale. Act II, Sc.1)

The smell of beeswax always recalled the atmosphere of a certain Loreto convent where the parquetry owed its super-sheen to a home-made concoction of the buts of Mass candles mixed with turpentine. As a little boy with iron tips on my boots, I dreaded the perils of that polished floor more than the corrections of my veiled violin teacher.

Since those early days my museum of olefactory memories has been enriched with delights of many kinds. Eucalyptus oil has definite associations with chest-rubbing--a not unpleasant memory in itself. But for me it conjures up the picture of a sub-tropical garden near Baveno in Italy. It was at the villa of Maurice Blondel, regaling us with stories of Queen Victoria's visit to the neighbouring Villa D'Adamo. I plucked a leaf of an eucalyptus and crushed it between my hands. That was in 1947, and ever since the fragrance of eucalyptus is linked in memory with the smiling blue of Lake Maggiore and the terraced magic of Isola Bella.

The smell of a ship's hawser takes me further afield, and I am once again standing at the rail of the Tarkwa tied up at Lagos. The air is filled with a tangled web of odours. Cargoes of palm oil and ground nuts blend their earthiness with the tang of timber cut in equatorial forests and with the pungency of oranges. The tray-loads of fish cakes balanced on the heads of the trading Yaruba women would have won a sniff in any ordinary Nigerian market; here even that doubtful savour is obliterated in the overpowering rankness. It would take a Masefield to write the scene and a Carlyle to tell the tale of human sweat pressed in the mill of human labour. Certainly not a drawing-room atmosphere. There is a measure of relief in going to the other side of the ship and breathing in the brakish air of the lagoon.

My nose has always been partial to the bouquet of the vine, from the first crushing of the grape in a sun-drenched valley near Neuchatel to the quiet dalliance with a glass of vin rose in a lakeside inn in Zurich. I found the yeoman spirit of England preserved in the homely substantial smell of cider in the vat; I found the cut and thrust of Irish wit in the yeasty fulness of a pint of "Liffey water". But give me a glass of Hennessy and I am transported in thought to a midnight scene at the airport at Castel Benito. Having flown across the desert I had exchanged some tattered Tripolitan lire for a much needed refresher. The tawny liquid was as welcome to my drooping spirit as any Olympian nectar. Then I saw them, four of them, almost ridiculously out of place, and yet nothing could be out of place at that airport where so many worlds meet. It was with indescribable emotion that I gazed on those four Paul Henry pictures which brought a breath of Ireland to the sandy wastes of North Africa. I shall never forget that glass of brandy. In it were blended the spirit of Champagne, the mystery of the Sahara, and the opalescent blue of Connemara.

Forgive the sudden transition. Do you like Irish stew? I have my own hereditary formula for the perfect stew, but it does not taste the same just now. Returning home from work my nose was always alert to detect "what's cookin' ". I liked the smell of dinner to greet me at the door and had no time for those faddists who claim that the appetising odours of the kitchen should not pervade the rest of the house. If there's steak and onions on the menu, let it greet me at the garden gate! At least that's the way it used to be. Next to the thrill of a cock pheasant rising from the dogs I ranked the gamey tang of pheasant in the dish. Now all those exciting tastes are scaled down and it is only after a few mouthfuls that they begin to register. Even a Chicken Maryland is somewhat insipid, and a fried egg almost tasteless.

Recently I was doing some painting around the house and needed turpentine to thin the paint. There was a bottle in the basement cupboard but I could not pick the right one out from the array of unlabelled bottles of linseed oil, turps and varnishes. I cannot distinguish petrol from kerosene or lighter fuel.

Will my sense of smell return? The doctors cannot say. Thank God I still have sight and hearing and touch and taste, and through those channels I continue to draw upon the vast treasures of beauty in the world of nature and art and literature. But I miss the goodly smell of many things.

I miss the smell of the sea, of the spray carried in from the wild Atlantic to Tullan Strand; I miss the warm smell of gorse in the hills above the Knather; I miss the smell of clover in June and of dying leaves in autumn; I miss the smell of horses and dogs and all the mingled odours of life on the land. I smile upon the primrose and the violet; to me they are ever beautiful, but their beauty reaches me filtered of its lambent sweetness.

Ah well, I have the memory to cheer me. But memory itself is dimmed when the sense of smell is gone, and only in my dreams do I sometimes recapture the vividness of the reality. A few nights ago I dreamed of lily of the vallery and breathed its pure intoxication in my sleep. In the morning it was gone. I was back in my sterile world, whose roses--by whatever name--smell not at all.

The End

Note: Brian never did recover his sense of smell, but judging by the above he compensated in prose with an over-dose of hyphenitis.

Loss of the sense of smell seems to strike members of my family with dramatic suddeness. Readers who have perused "The Vindicator Story" may recall the tale of the compositor who delighted in shocking unsuspecting printers' devils by inserting a live wire in some slugs of metal and asking them to hand them to him. The "joke", if that is what it was, seems to have had a long history. An e-mail from Frances Maguire tells the story:

"James McAdam was my grandfather and your uncle....We we have heard that James was told (when only a young apprentice) to stand on a chair and get the wire out of the light bulb, and to put this in the tooth which was causing him toothache. You can imagine the result! He ended up the other side of the room and thereafter was minus any sense of smell."