Back in February, while searching in the cupboard under the kitchen sink for something with which to clean the shower, I had a moment of pure summery bliss. To say it was unexpected is an understatement. Outside, the sky was dark though it was only mid-afternoon. The sun had barely made it out of bed all day. I had a deadline looming – hence I’d decided it was time to do some serious deep cleaning- and it was so cold I was wearing a bobble hat indoors. The summer holidays could not have seemed further away. Yet just for a second or two, I was sitting by the pool in the garden of a villa in Tuscany. I could hear the contented hum of bees in the shimmering banks of lavender that edged the warm stone tiles of the terrace. I could see the beads of condensation on the outside of a perfectly chilled glass of white wine. Up above me, swallows chased each other across the sky.
Three Days in Florence
All that summer loveliness was contained in a single tiny bottle, which had been stuffed out of sight beneath the sink since I’d last sat by that pool for real. The bottle held organic anti-mosquito spray. It was a mixture of innocuous essential oils that had proved about as good as a smear of strawberry jam might have been at preventing the evil bugs from making a meal out of me. But useless though it was, the anti-mozzie spray smelled delicious and I’d happily worn it on those lazy summer days. Just uncapping the bottle released enough of the fragrance – citronella and lavender - to send me flying back in time.
The scent of summer is as important as the sight of clear blue skies or the sensation of warm sunshine on skin. For me, a perfect summer smells of Tuscan lavender and also of ginestra, the yellow flowering bush we rather less romantically call ‘broom’. It smells of pale white wine and warm tomatoes picked straight from the plant. It smells of sun-block and after-sun. And yes, it sometimes even smells of Deet.
This summer hasn’t been a summer of long hot days by the pool for me. It’s been a summer of writing deadlines of the kind that make cleaning seem preferable. I fractured a metatarsal at the end of May and have spent seven sunny weeks in a surgical boot. I had to cancel trips I’d been looking forward to for months. But I treated myself to a bottle of lemon-scented essential oil that reminded me of that useless bug spray and every now and then, when I’m sitting with my chin in my hands wondering what to write next, I smell the oil on my wrists and I’m by the pool again. That lemony tang is my equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, reminding me that once you’ve had one good summer, you carry it with you forever and go back to it whenever you want to