Dialogue: Sense of smell not to be sniffed at

Smells are like pain: our minds can't recreate them. Try now to conjure up the stabs of toothache or the perfume of boiled mutton. I can't and I presume you can't and I think we should be grateful. It's nature's way of protecting us. Good pain is no pain and the same is pretty well true of smells.

Perhaps that's why in the smell department language lets us down. We can say something smells nice or that it smells nasty. For anything more precise we fall back on similes. We say something smells like something else, which is like telling someone from Bulls that Venice in October reminds them of Karachi.

Wine buffs play this trick constantly. They sink their educated beaks into a glass, look knowing for a bit, then pronounce that there are hints of passionfruit. You ask what passionfruit smells like. They tell you to sniff the wine.

Although we can't recreate smells, we recognise them with stunning immediacy. I have just applied linseed oil to the door of a chookhouse because it seemed as good a way as any to spend the afternoon. It was.

One sniff of the linseed oil and I was instantly an 8-year-old in short trousers oiling my bat. I can tell you the make of bat - Stuart Surridge. I can describe the wallpaper of the bedroom I was oiling it in - racing cars.

I can even see the bottle of oil with its ancient label made translucent by drips, like the paper round fish and chips. Finding words for the visual images, you see, is no problem. But the smell that set me hurtling back down the corridor of memory - well, it smelled like linseed oil.

Poets bang on about smell a lot. It's a mark of sensitivity. Evocative is the word they use. The heavy scent of roses, the musky eglantine, the bracing perfume of a Nordic pine forest and all that, but the anthologies don't say much about disinfectant.

The sense of smell makes things happen. When I first tried to sell a house, I was advised to seduce buyers by baking bread. This presumed that I knew how to bake bread. It also presumed the oven worked. I just bought a wholemeal loaf, undid the bag and left it on the bench. The house sold immediately.

I've got less faith in what the industry likes to call fragrances. Mass-market women's perfumes get primitive names - Venom, Passion, O. The posher ones are more understated. Chanel No 5 is supposed to suggest Parisian women wearing only their elegance. But I find myself wondering what was wrong with Nos 1 to 4.

Men's scents are no more convincing. According to the ads, underarm deodorants should come with a stick to beat the women off. Try smearing the stuff on and then standing in a park with one arm curled over your head a la gibbon. You'll go home arm in arm with disappointment.

Whatever direction you approach a department store from, you always walk into cosmetics. The air is thick enough to make you drunk, which is probably the idea. Ghoulish saleswomen wearing foundation as thick as a mudpack pounce as you come through the door and squirt toilet water on the underside of your wrist.

This is all fine by me and I don't mind smelling like a brothel, but I do think toilet water could be more prettily named.

Smell matters most to the young. In youth it seemed crucial to smell sweet.

We sniffed at our armpits and had a horror of bad breath. We used to cup our hands over our mouths to steer breath up our nostrils, an activity which prevented us from noticing that the pretty women kept hurling themselves into the arms of the feral thugs who stank like ferrets.

I am told that dogs have a hundred thousand times more smell receptors than people do. I sympathise. At full gallop on the hills my dogs are suddenly wrenched sideways by something invisible.

They're in thrall to the air. It's as if their nostrils were chained to the spot. Their back legs brace and swing round in an arc of which the geometric centre is the smell. All of which fails to explain why dogs like sinking their noses in places that you and I avoid.

Smell, it seems, is the most primitive of senses. Eyes might be the windows of the soul, but the nose is the door to the jungle.