In response to a request from a dear friend, heres a Morris story from yesteryear. Hope you like it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Smell and Back As I tumble through time toward my dotage, the past becomes an ever more precious resource. It’s where my priceless memories are stored after I’ve polished and plucked them to remove anything that might tarnish the good old days. I’m frequently transported to the past through conversations with friends and relatives who survived it alongside me, or via some golden oldie or other played on the radio. There’s also a reliable connection to yesteryear available from the seemingly unlimited line-up of Sky channels showing programmes I used to watch when I was but a dirty-kneed grub of a child. Yet, if I want instant time travel, I have no need of TV, radio, friend or relative; all I really need to do … is sniff. Special smells Smells are the most evocative force in nature. Newly-cut grass always spins me back to my junior school sports days, and the nervous anticipation of competing in front of the mums and dads. Pancakes cooking is an express memory train ride back to the time when such things were eaten once a year, which made it special. The scent of paraffin places me firmly back to my early life in a caravan, pumping a Tilley lamp and trying to light it with a trembling flame, knowing that one clumsy touch of the matchstick would wreck the ‘mantle’, a ludicrously fragile lattice of dust that would glow and become the lamp’s bulb. These smells and a million others hitch me to a wagon load of wonderful memories and off I trundle down the highways and byways of times gone by. Bless, eh? Special puppy My dear old Morris provided more than his fair share of memory-jerking smells, of course, and the first one he ever contributed in his eventful life, was an absolute belter. From that day to this, I can never inhale the cleansing vapour of concentrated bleach, without thinking back to Morris’s very first calamity. He was never a hesitant puppy. Rather, he barged through his early life with an attitude he’d refine until the word ‘oblivious’ seemed to hang over his empty head like a halo. While his full disregard of consequence was still in its infancy at the time of the bleach, he’d already achieved a blissful state of potentially lethal ignorance. The seeds of the future were sown the day I left Morris in our garden with an unguarded bottle of bleach that I’d used to scrub a year’s worth of muck off our tasteful white plastic garden furniture. The mistake I made was to think that no life form with any semblance of intelligence would mess with a huge plastic carafe of mega-concentrated bleach. In my defence, I was very entirely correct. Not guilty Everything else, from earwigs and woodlice, to my sainted mother-in-law, steered well clear of the bleach and I still feel that leaving puppy Morris in the garden for three minutes while I made a cup of coffee, was entirely justified. No jury of my peers would convict me on the evidence presented, but the fact remains that, as soon as I left the scene, wee Morris ignored the limitless temptations that garden contained and galloped straight to the big bottle of bleach. Within the first ten seconds of those same three minutes, Morris had driven his emerging teeth through the walls of the bleach bottle, and spent the next two minutes 50 seconds shaking it in the manner of a dead rat. Unlike any dead rats I’ve ever seen, the perforated bleach bottle now sprayed its caustic contents all over our back garden, and Morris. Unless you’ve actually seen what neat bleach can do to a lawn, some rhododendrons, a comfy swing-seat and a bull terrier puppy, it really does take some believing. All foliage, including the lawn, became instantly variegated, and the bleach eventually burned its merry way through the fabric of the swing-seat. Morris suffered the least collateral damage of all, perhaps due to being immediately hosed down for a full ten minutes, whilst helpfully wriggling and thrashing about the whole time. No-damage report Obviously, I thought he’d be at least blinded, or that his internal organs would dissolve or something, but apart from his toenails going a couple of shades lighter and the rest of him smelling faintly like a public swimming pool for a day or two, Morris was unscathed. This unforeseen calamity pretty much set the standard for the years to come, apart from the incident failing to cost me a fortune at the vet’s, of course. In this instance, I simply didn’t have the time to let the vet deal with it so I took matters, and the hosepipe, into my own hands and washed away Morris’s wrongdoings. If only his future crimes could have been so easily flushed away. Back to the future I’ve still got Morris’s blanket, collar and harness, so a smelly-vision view on the good old days is only ever a sniff away, plus my sons seem capable of matching Morris’s smell output in certain other areas, if you get my drift. I hope that one day a new puppy will be here and a whole fresh memory bank of smells will receive its first deposit. Heaven scent, you might say. ---------------------------------- E N D -------------------------------
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 17:36:43 +0000
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