You can be blind folded for a drive around Pyrmont and you will still know that you are driving past the fish markets.

We were riding home from Lansdowne one Sunday and Peter came up with a ‘trade secret’. He said that we can remember a smell far better than anything else. So, as we get older and we may fall into the clutches of Alzheimer, it will be important to know this secret.

I was brought up in a farm and this setting provided me with a memory that is as fresh as yesterday. I remember that we were out in the farm working and we were hit with this sudden storm. As the rain pelted overhead, my mum found some shade under a rocky overhang for us and we huddled together for the storm to pass. I remember this event so well only because I can still remember the smell of my mum as she held me under her arms.

My mum died a few years ago, so I do not have another opportunity to experience that unique smell again – but the memory of the smell does not go away. I cannot describe the motherly smell, but I am sure to spot it if it ever came my way again (and I don’t remember that latest time this ever happened).

When Tom Cruise in one of his movies shouted “Show me the Money!”, he was reflecting our obsession with seeing and touching as the basis for our reality. We can describe things to one another by size and colour – hence our reliance on sight. But we cannot see or feel a smell. This makes it so hard to describe.

It is interesting that when someone says that they ‘smell a rat’ or that ‘something smells fishy’, it is a statement that their inner intuition is telling them something that their outer reality is failing to show them.

Perhaps the reason why a smell can hang around for ever is just to show us what true reality is. It is something so real that on one can see or touch it. As lives slip in and out of this world, we do not see them come and we do not see them go – we only just see the ‘containers’ that hold those lives change in colour and size.