16 August, 2006
From Bloomsbury to Birmingham and back in 20 years
Typing the word Schubert caused two things instantly to happen.
One, I immediately recalled at the name, as I always do now, the melody of the impromptu played at my uncle’s funeral over a year ago. I had never heard the piece before. Second, I caught a scent, a real scent, that reminded me of childhood Summers spent at his house.
Someone in the flat nextdoor was cooking mince, and the smell was slowly meandering through my open office. Suddenly I was 7 years old, and it was the middle of Summer. I was sitting out in my grandparents’ garden in Halesowen, chasing my sister about the lawn or being twirled around by my uncle until I was dizzy with giggling. My grandmother was cooking lunch with the kitchen door open - the scent of mince and onions and overcooked vegetables wafting out into the open air.
And then, just as suddenly, the smell disappeared.
Suddenly I wasn’t a 7 year old boy, with the great expanse of Summer stretching out ahead of him, playing in the garden without a care in the world. Suddenly I was someone 20 years older, sitting in a cold office in Summer’s prematurely dying embers, staring into a computer screen and trying not to think about the fact that he hates his job, or will be moving in a month and doesn’t have anywhere to go, or wants likes nothing else to be a published writer but secretly knows he’ll never make it because he’s lazy and the only thing he can be relied upon to do is make excuses, or knows he has a cold coming because his throat burns when he eats, or is just cripplingly alone.
I could have wondered what that 7 year old boy would have thought of his future if he’d known, or what my now dead uncle who taught me to draw and encouraged me to write would think about his nephew wasting every opportunity that came his way just to continue spinning a 9 to 5 plastic wheel that he hates. Instead I didn’t.
I just listened to Schubert in my mind, and thought about mince and onions instead. The sudden presence / sudden absence of its scent made me more than hungry. It made me crave it like nothing else.
