My Essentials: Pears Soap

I love the dodgy etch-a-sketch images drawn on paint and here's my homage to the classic Pears soap. Pears soap was formulated in 1789 by Andrew Pears as an alternative to the existing harsh soaps and cosmetics. The resulting natural glycerine soap scented with rosemary and thyme, invoking an English country garden, has proved enduringly popular.

As a teenager I used it as facial cleanser and it cleared up the spots that medicated products aggravated. Now there's always a couple of bars on the go in my bathroom, although I've strayed and indulged in expensive varieties of soap, but as a chic recession buster Pears soap cannot be beaten.

It was reformulated in 2009 and the new formula has a heavier resinous fragrance, so I'm out to the shops today to read the ingredients on packets of Pears for rosemary and thyme and buying them up! This will last me until I've perfected a natural fragrance for making my own glycerine soap.

All I Want For Christmas

For me this is a thing of beauty and I hope Alec Lawless www.essentially-me.co.uk doesn't mind me picturing it. I have a cardboard box that is filling up with my supplies of essential oils, scent smelling strips, fuller's earth and mixing bottles, as I inhale centuries of fragrances and record my impressions. This lab kit demands space, a desk of my own at least, and gives me the same sense of excitement I got in a chemistry class at fifteen. The thrill of adding essences drop by drop, blending and testing, is all consuming at the moment. I have dropped hints and emailed links but so far nothing under the tree with my name on it looks the right shape or size.

Christmas Special: Mince Pies

The seasonal deliciousness of crumbly rich pastry and the sweet, spicy - cinnamon, cloves, plump raisins, sherry and brandy with a strong brew of assam tea is unbeatable. It was today's replacement for a balanced lunch!

Childhood Smells: Oranges at Christmas

I still feel Christmas stockings should have an orange in the toe, eaten while the grown-ups still sleep. The guiltiness of creeping downstairs to unwrap presents, to be surprised by sleepy parents and found with orange peel and chocolate wrappers strewn around us. The smell of oranges is a Christmas smell for me, laden with the past preciousness of this fruit now taken so much for granted. The occasion of the season remains for me with clementines at their best in the winter. Nigella's clementine cake is the cake I make myself for Christmas and the smell of the simmering clementines, and the baking cake,create a thick, sweet tangerine fugginess that signals the festive season.

My kids have rebelled against clementines in their stockings as their place in the fruit bowl is taken for granted, so in the spirit of spherical deliciousness they get a Lush bath bomb in the toe of their stockings. This year's is orange-scented and pleases me much.

Childhood Smells: My Mother's Handbag

As a small child my mother's handbag seemed voluminous, and spoke of an exotic world that I'd never reach and when sent to get her purse, or a hanky, I'd inhale a smell that exuded grown-upness. There was the shiny tan leather of the bag and the silk lining that absorbed many other fragrances: the faintest touch of laundry soap from clean, ironed handkerchiefs, but overwhelmingly the scent of her pressed face powder escaping slightly from its metal compact, a slight waxy note of lipstick and remnants of the perfume she wore from scarves put in her bag. There was also always her red leather address book, a pair of black leather gloves and a pen.

For me this is the smell of glamour - leather and powder, silk and a background medley of fragrance. I bought the Annick Goutal candle 'Le sac de ma mere' in anticipation of finding this smell again, but it was not my smell of my mother's handbag, it was the smell of Annick Goutal's for her daughter, Camille. For me it smelt violetish like a Guerlain lipstick, lovely but not my mum.

Childhood Smells: Christmas Trees

Christmas trees have to be real; Christmas needs the smell of spruce or pine, the deeply green, foresty fragrances among my favourites from walking in woods. My childhood Christmas' were spent at my grandparents' and now each year I buy a real tree and overload it with light and glittering baubles in a re-creation of the ceiling-brushing tree they always had. Presents get stacked up under the tree in their gaudy wrappings for Christmas morning, and we sit together passing out the presents one-by-one. This important ritual by the lit stove is accompanied with a pot of tea and breakfast treats. Mutual torment takes place with parents insisting presents come from Santa, and our kids goading us about our silliness. Their stockings no longer have satsumas in their toes, they rebelled - there are always piles of them in the fruit bowl, so now they get a seasonal bath bomb from Lush.

This smell of pine forests I love so much is found in Olverum bath oil http://www.olverum.com/home, which I put in the bath for a soak before I wash my hair and the fragrance then lingers all around me.

Childhood Smells: Coughs and Sneezes, part 2

One constant for the treatment of childhood coughs was a thick, sticky medicine with a pungent smell and a strong taste. Always in dark brown glass bottles, these balsams give us the medicinal vocabulary for pungent and fabulous resins in describing scent. Even now the original formulas can be bought like Covonia's still in a brown bottle but many others have been repackaged; Weleda's are delightfully old-fashioned and the Lavender & Myrrh mouthwash from Neal's Yard is wonderfully efficacious.

Childhood smells: coughs and sneezes

The school Christmas holidays always seemed to start with diseases for me, pyjamas on the sofa, and in my mother's bathroom cabinet what was 'Vick's vapour rub' has a mentholated smell redolent of the preparations for the festive season.

Smells of childhood 3: coming home for Christmas

The last pungent memory I discussed was the one I associated with my Gran, it seems pertinent now to discuss the next most important smell I associate with someone in my life. Just before one Christmas in the 1970s I sat on the stairs with my mother and sister, by the telephone, waiting for news of my father who had been on business trip to Prague. Prague airport was closed and he, and a colleague, wanting to be home at Christmas had hired a car and were driving to Vienna to get a flight back. He came home with his usual gift for my mother, a bottle of what he always called 'Channel No5'. My mother likes other fragrances and I know when she wears Arpege or Coco, but the only way she should really smell is of Chanel No5. then I can be calm and know that when she hugs me I am safe.

Smells of childhood 2: My Gran

This is a memory of another soap but I only realised it was the smell of a soap when I moved into my house 10 years ago. Our house had been a C19 general store and in the old stable at the end of the garden we found a crate of Sunlight soap. One whiff and I was transported back to my great grandmother's house. This was my Gran's smell: she washed with it, scrubbed with it and swore it was the best thing for washing underwear.First made in 1884 it was a naturally-derived soap and now only made in Canada, although celebrated at Port Sunlight:

http://www.portsunlightvillage.com/

For me it conjours up one of the beloved figures of my life: her wicked smile, the floral dresses my mother regularly made her - always from the same pattern, the hydrangeas and gladioli she grew in her garden, her budgie, seed cake and the way her hearing-aid whistled when she turned it off.

Smells of childhood 1: coal tar

A programme I caught part of on Radio 4 mentioned the smell of coal tar and its use on Izal toilet paper as the ingredient that made it medicated. I remember the toilet paper well, see:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/minor-british-institutions-izal-toilet-paper-1727294.html

But it's the smell of tar freshly laid on roads that I remember from my childhood and I love it. I can pick up a bar of Wright's coal tar soap in the supermarket and inhale the pungent image of cleanliness, whilst the black tar itself squigged and oozed in the sun.