Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure

Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so large, at 654 pages and weighing nearly a kilo, that I could only manage to read it at the kitchen table — which made me appreciate its wipe-clean binding. Its distinctive new-book smell (there is such a thing) contrasts mightily with the musty, familiar old-book scent of my study. As I walk through the house, I detect the not entirely agreeable whiff of last night’s wood fire in the sitting-room, but this gives way to the snap-to-attention aroma of just-made coffee, the fragrance of the sliced banana and apple in the morning muesli, the scent of the loaf just out of the oven and the unmistakable redolence of toast. Of course, there’s the flip side; it’s amazing how much of this book is about bad smells — ‘faecal’ and ‘urinous’ frequently qualify one of Roget’s very many synonyms for ‘smell’.