Thanks for the car-nasal memories

I was watching a bit of the’One Show’ last night whilst letting my dinner go down. I really quite like Alex, the Welsh woman who present it. I love her accent and I find her a very natural presenter who has her eye on the ‘time’ ball but get’s what she wants from the guests whilst making them feel at ease. That’s highly skilled in my opinion.

Anyway, she had some guest on from the latest version of ‘Top Gear’. Freddy Flintoff etc. I confess to never having been a fan of Top Gear but if I’m truthful it’s mostly because of the previous versions presenters presentation style which got right up my nose and consequently I haven’t watched this version at all.

I was intrigued by the conversation about cars they remembered from their youth. Essentially their parents cars. It looks like the program had sourced the same cars from the relevant years that their parents had them and each presenter got to sit in and drive the relevant model. What was lovely was their almost childlike glee and awe about how evocative the whole experience was but particularly the smell. That made me reminisce about similar experiences and often to do with cars.

I was born at the end of 1960 and fostered until I was 4 and a half so my memories come from after that time. Cars then had leather seats and, of course people smoked in them too. I was one of those children who suffered terribly from motion sickness and the mix of the smell of hot leather, stale cigarettes and lingering perfume was enough to set me off before the car had even started. I am sure if I were in that situation again I would be mentally reduced to a vulnerable little girl with green gills both knowing she’s about to, and trying terribly hard not to, decorate the car with diced carrots (and creme de menthe if you’re the pope). Thinking of that time also shoots me to those moments of getting in in a skirt or shorts and sitting on really hot leather which you then stuck to and had to peel yourself off at the other end of the journey, leaving the car with large red welts on the back of your thighs. Ouch!

There’s memories of a car that I can’t remember the make or model of, although the seats, which feature large, are definitely a sort of slightly sicky cream colour and journeys in a motor bike and side car. Our favourite boyfriend that mum had was a tall lanky man with dark glasses and a large adam’s apple called Dennis or Den as some people called him. He was also a tinkerer . You know, out there fettling his motor bike in the days when ordinary folk could understand the basics of motor mechanics and didn’t need a diagnostics machine to do it for them, so he always smelt of petrol and cigarettes. He would wear a big old holey jumper and clasp you to his specific sent of man, petrol and ciggs. As I liked him I rather liked that smell and being grasped to his gangly, angley body.

Years later it’s whether a car smells clean or not that I notice and I take great pleasure in the smell of new cars or cars freshly cleaned but not, I add swiftly, with those horrible chemical dangly air freshener things. I hate that cloying false smell and would never have them plugged in in my house either. Anyone else have clear car smell, journey smell memories?