On the weekend, a friend and I went walking. As we strolled along the River Goyt, a sweet smell hit us like a packet of Love Hearts, which, as it turns out, is pretty much what it was. We had inadvertently walked past the Swizzels factory – producer of Parma Violets, Rainbow Drops and more in the Sett Valley since the company moved out of blitzed London in 1940, to an old textile mill in New Mills, Derbyshire.
Alongside the sugary cloud drifted a junk shop of memories, sweets handed out at jelly and ice-cream parties, shared on the kerb outside the corner shop, sucked on the way home from school. Later on, we passed a man pushing a mower to and fro on his front lawn and that fresh hit set off a whole other chain of flashbacks. As a cricket lover, you probably know where this is going.
Another Test cricketer without a sense of smell is Simon Katich, who lost the ability to sniff an old baggy green after an attack of glandular fever. That also knocked him down the waiting list for a Test place after the rookie Ricky Ponting muscled into the vacant spot in the Australian middle order while Katich languished in bed. Not being able to sniff the difference between parsley and sage did not hold him back when he got to the semi-finals of Australia’s Celebrity MasterChef in 2009, impressing the judges with his crispy salmon with wilted spinach and mashed potato, and then a 10-layer crepe cake.
Can we take anything away from these two fine cricketers being unable to smell? Could it be that their inability to register the stinking pheromones of an angry fast bowler – thinking here in particular of a furious Allan Donald pawing at the ground at Trent Bridge in 1998 – helped keep them calm? Might a lack of flamboyance at the crease be related to their inability get a sensory hit from a morning espresso or never having to endure the whiff of a post-match nightclub?
Fun as it might be to ponder, no amount of ruminating can stop the passing days. There is something in the air: the season is coming.
