Tommy Wilson: Sweet smells offer scents of place

Like a welcomed guest, I hope the scent of summer stays just a little bit longer this year.

Summer is so close I can almost smell it. Winter has been with us for way too long with its damp and dreary odours like a school hall mop cupboard, and now it's time for some happy, sweet smells of summer.

There was the smell of Welsh rarebit as the ABs cooked Wales for Richie's 100th, and for fans of JuJu lips Jagger, the smell of sweet satisfaction was all over Mt Smart Stadium on Saturday night, as he strutted his stuff like a Hyena on heat, leaving the audience rolling home happily afterwards.

Some say there is a smell of money in the air after the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan and others say they smell a rat in the year of the horse, and don't believe bowing down to another country for financial gain is culturally cool.

There are some strange aromas coming from down south in the State Services office that could get a lot smellier, especially when you try to dress up Sutton as lamb.

Childhood smells are on speed dial when the scent of something familiar wafts my way. Summer smells of the '60s and '70s seem to have stayed long after my abundant hair, sharp eyesight and slim waistline have left.

They range from the perfumed scented sarong, fresh off the plane from Bali, to the smell of surfies soaked in patchouli oil and Bodgees slicked back with Brylcreem.

You knew that summer had arrived at the Mount in the '70s when Coppertone and its sickly smell covered every bit of bare skin - and back then there was plenty of it.

Freshly roasted peanuts from the Del Monte caf called you inside as did the foot-long crispy battered hot dogs next door to the Lee Mount Dairy, where today an equally enviably aroma of Copenhagen Cones tempts the taste buds to "step inside love".

Every Guy Fawkes the smell of phosphorous and gun powder takes me back to bonfires on the beach and the early morning search for crackers and fizzers that never made it to a match.

Of course kai plays a big part on anyone's favourite smell menu.

Jim Stanley's El Toreador fish 'n' chips delivered to Omanu School at lunchtimes, with Central Parade Pies from Summers' bakery, were smells to die for as a hungry kid, knowing full well that lunch orders were never going to happen in a family that numbered close to a baker's dozen.

However, the smell of Mum's porridge, first thing on a cold winter's morning, still stays with me as does the mountain of home-made fish cakes she would pile on my plate, during a mad dash home at lunchtime, while my classmates nibbled away like rabbits on lifeless lettuce and cheese sandwiches.

During the long summer weekends and school holidays when the wind was blowing off shore, we could smell the ships on the wharf and what they were cooking for kai, as we could the smell of the coal-burning steam trains late at night, as they grumbled past pine forests that we played in all summer and their smells are the same as they ever were.

Golf course fairways at sunset were, and still are, a favourite on the summer smell register.

Not such a sweet smell today is when you cross the causeway to Otumoetai, and the 'dump factory' trespasses your flight path, like an uninvited guest to your nostrils. Instantly I am back in Denpasar or downtown New Delhi as a teenage back packer, where the sewers are like their sacred cows, open and free range.

Today as we head toward a sugarless-smell-free diet, I will still go to my grave shackled to the smell of a fresh watercress and bacon bone boil-up, and no amount of doomsday, dietary calorie counting will convince me otherwise.

Stapled with this like a stomach needing a downsizing operation, is my all-time favourite fragrance of a hangi - done the real way, when the sizzling juices of wild pork and watercress sends out a smell so puku friendly, whanau you haven't seen for years show up for a feed.

Right now the smell of vanilla in any form - and jet fuel - are favourites. They remind me of far-off places I have travelled to and would like to see again. So too the smell of low tide as you drive into town along Takitimu Drive. It is a smell unique to Tauranga that you can find again walking around Mauao.

For me it's an ageless ancient smell, a happy smell that signals summer is here in the bouquet of plenty.

And like a welcomed guest, I hope the scent of summer stays just a little bit longer this year.

broblack@xtra.co.nz

-Tommy Kapai is a Tauranga author and writer.