"I can be on a train, or just walking down the street when I catch a whiff of someone lighting up a pipe - and instantly I'm ten. I'm sitting wrapped up in the Double Decker stand at Filbert Street with my dad and Uncle Ken and someone we only ever knew as The Shiverer, and there's an old boy a couple of rows in front of us, struggling to spark up his half-time shag.
It's as if I'm there, transported by this smokey magic smell. I can actually see it and feel it and hear it - although the tannoy system is still fuzzy. Leicester City are two-nil down - probably.
It takes a million-to-one chemical combination to unlock a memory. One smell that always takes me there, even conjures up a mood, is hairdresser's perm solution. If I walk by a hairdresser's and that acrid pong is seeping out of the door, I'm instantly bored out of my mind, waiting for mum under the dryer at 'Curl Up and Dye', where my sister worked. 30 years disappear in a second.
I've found it's possible to use certain smells to deliberately take a sniff back in time. Get down on your knees and smell the carpet, really close up. It smells exactly like it did when you used to spend half you life playing at ground-level. Open a new box of chocolates and take time to smell that corrugated paper sitting on top: that's the smell of Christmas, 1974.
I asked my mum about her great lost smells. She said Yorkshire pudding and beer and clinging smoke - grandad Green coming home from the pub for Sunday dinner. I told mum my no-so-great lost smell - of lipstick and cigarettes and spit on a Kleenex as she rubbed too hard all around my jammy face. The smell of infant outrage.
So: beer, smoke and spit. Not, perhaps, the most romantic olfactory memories but, even if I could, I'd never swap them for anything.
