Ten or more years ago I lost my sense of smell. It may have happened gradually, a slow procession tiptoeing from my senses: first, the subtlest smells; last, the most obvious ones, starting (say) with the woody fragrance of pencil shavings and ending with the reek of farmyard slurry. The truth is that I can’t remember. I think I didn’t smell India, which has a pungent repertoire, when I went back in December 2005 after an eight-year absence, but the loss may have begun long before. Certainly, I can’t remember the last time I smelt the sea, which is among the smells I miss most, but then neither can I remember the first time I didn’t smell it. All I know is that, slowly or quickly, my nose lost its olfactory power.
Smoking has always seemed the likeliest cause – an instinctive diagnosis on my part because I never went to see a doctor or looked it up online. I can understand why I didn’t do the first: why bother a doctor with a condition that was easily bearable and probably, I suspected, untreatable? The second omission is more surprising, given that I use a search engine many dozens of times every day and somehow never once tapped in “smell loss” to discover that the condition has a name, anosmia, and that it could be symptomatic of a wide range of ailments, including Alzheimer’s and poisoning by snake bite. I’m not a stoic. In the past, Dr Google has noted my symptoms and suggested – with chilling neutrality – that it was a toss-up between lymphoma and a brain tumour. Compared with the symptoms that took me to the keyboard at that time, smell loss was small beer.
Of course, I regretted that one of the ways Iunderstood the world had gone for ever, with practical as well as aesthetic consequences. “What’s that smell?” was a good question when our drains backed up, but somebody else had to ask it. I lived with different questions, not always spoken: “Does the house smell of cats?” “Does the bathroom smell of me?” “Do these sausages smell off?” There could be no more of the boyish habit, secretly maintained, of pressing one’s nose to yesterday’s shirt to see if it was still wearable. The benefits of smelling are often invoked by the phrases “new-mown grass” and “freshly baked bread”, but these things are really just a holiday for the nose, which has more important work to do.
This was the state of affairs until last Saturday, which where I live was a calm day of blue skies and magnolia blossom, exactly the kind of spring day described by the food writer Bee Wilson in her piece on anosmia published that morning in the Guardian magazine. Her opening paragraph sets the scene. You’re walking through the park to work. There’s birdsong, banks of creamy-gold narcissi, and the joggers have an extra bounce in their step. “You know there is something special in the air,” Wilson continues, “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 ... are cut off from a thousand small joys that the rest of us depend on.”
It was an interesting piece. It introduced me to the medical term for my condition and awoke my curiosity about it. I learned things I didn’t know before, which is the primary purpose of journalism, including where, if I needed it, I could find advice: there’s a charity called Fifth Sense. But I found it hard to recognise myself in Wilson’s case studies or her estimate of anosmia’s life-changing effects, and I finished reading the piece unhappier than when I began, feeling that perhaps it should have been preceded by that thing called a trigger warning, not because it sparked off memories of past trauma, but because it might plant the seeds of trauma, or at least anxiety, to come.
Take the idea that anosmia makes the passing seasons “almost meaningless”. I looked into the back garden when I read it – the kerria had flowered yellow over the fence, the red camellia was still in bloom, tiny buds had begun to give a purplish touch to the Japanese maple. Spring to me seemed to have as much meaning as ever. Unlike autumn, with its garden fires and leaf rot, spring isn’t a season that has much of a smell to it, and we apprehend every season, even autumn, much more though sight and touch – how green, how hot or cold – than by anything our nose detects.
Nevertheless, Wilson thinks that my kind of anosmic experience is “deeply disorienting”. There is evidence. Molly Birnbaum, an anosmic American chef, got so angry when customers in her bakery told her how good the bread smelled that, in her words: “I wanted to spit into their food.” Tom Laughton, a middle-aged man defined as hyposmic (the equivalent of partially sighted), says that the missing smells have altered his “sense of place” in the world. “With smell, when breathing in, the world comes inside us,” he says. “Without smell, when I see things, they just stay where they are. They are nothing to do with me.”
As taste and smell are closely allied, many people have lost both senses. Some, the congenital anosmics, have never known them. A mother tells Wilson how, in a blind taste test, her daughter identified cooked carrots as potatoes and pepper as grains of sand. She had no real enjoyment of food and never seemed to register hunger – her mother suspected an eating disorder. The cause turned out to be a severely bent septum, which meant an operation could bring her sense of smell to life. Not many anosmics are so easily treated: often, the condition presents itself after a blow to the head or some other shock, or mysteriously arrives without ascertainable cause, in which cases the remedy is also unknown.
“To live without a sense of smell is one of the more unsettling forms of human disability, and one of the least understood,” writes Wilson. “It’s a double trauma: you’ve lost something you probably never realised would matter. Where damage to other senses is recognised as traumatic, loss of smell is seen as trivial, even by doctors.”
I am lucky. I can still taste, and for most of my life I could smell, too. In any case, many people aged over 60 are in the same boat – according to some findings, most of us are to some degree. One result of Wilson’s piece was to make me feel this luck, but another, and far stranger effect arrived with the suspicion that I had taken my condition too lightly – that I was in fact a member of a disabled and neglected group, not far removed from a caste of the afflicted. I was happier not to think of it.
