One sniff and you’re back in ’66

PAV’S PATCH: IT’S funny how hearing a particular piece of music can transport you back to a time and place. You can instantly remember what you were doing and who you were with.

I find smells have a similar impact. The other day, I was passing the old folk’s home across the road from where I live and found myself drifting back to 1966. There was a man in the smoking room puffing thick twist and it reminded me of old Mr Brennan.

He used to sit by the fire smoking a pipe and, every so often, clearing his throat and spitting into the flames. All right, not the height of etiquette, but I liked the smell then and I found the 2010 version very comforting.

In fact, I found it such a warm memory that if tobacco wasn’t so bad for you I’d probably have gone out and bought a pipe.

Perfume is similarly effective for sparking the memory banks in to action. Sometimes that can be a good thing and sometimes bad.

When your girlfriend dumps you, as has happened so many times to me, the smell of her make-up seems to linger everywhere — reminding you of what you lost.

Certain scents take me back to aunties who had to be kissed before they would hand over half-a-crown. Even the toffees produced from their handbag would smell of it.

Opium (the perfume not the narcotic) instantly reminds me of a Christmas romance in the mid-1980s. Oh, what a girl Carla was. Unfortunately, her mother — who could brew a wonderful cup of tea — liked me more than she did.

And then there’s Charlie fragrance, as our American cousins would call it. That reminds me of another girlfriend, but more so of my chums at Hyde sorting office when I was a postman.

back then I was a cheeky young oik and once, after answering back to one of the older posties, I was held down by a group of them while another one — a woman, I hasten to add — doused me in Charlie (again, the perfume not the narcotic).

Believe you me, I got some very curious looks from the public while I was out delivering mail that morning.

The rotters also made sure that my Manchester United scarf was saturated. Oh what fun I had on the Stretford End a night or two later.

Walk into a school, and you’ll find the smell of the disinfectant is the same as it was in 1970.

But what can really get to you is the aroma of food.

Chips, cooked in lard — not this namby-pamby oil — take me right back to the happy days of my youth.