Written by Jacqueline Corrigan | 08 November 2011

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. Helen Keller

Ah yes, Helen, you couldn't have been more right. Nothing takes one back to a moment in time so quickly, automatically and completely as the sense of smell. It is primal and instinctive. It stimulates pleasure and alerts us to danger. It can dictate mood – happy, sad, relaxed, excited. It is the one sense that is most closely linked to memory.

Smell, that silent, invisible force, is like an internal GPS system guiding the mind’s eye often before any other sense comes into play. Inhaling the aroma of a great dish, a fine wine or sexy perfume instantly brings to mind the memory of a place, time or person. It can also signal, “Danger Will Robinson, danger!”
The clothes we wear might shout, “You hoo, look at me.” But, the right perfume can do that, too, in a much more subtle way – unless you OD on it, of course. The reaction to smell is so automatic that the body’s immediate reaction is often difficult to control, whether you like the smell or not. You might be able to turn your eyes away from the individual wearing the Herb Tarlek suit, but the smell of perfume sends an automatic sonar ping to the brain that commands a search for the source.

Written by Matthew Sullivan | 03 November 2011

The trappings of Victorian England are not terribly fashionable these days: debtors' prison, child labour and gunboat colonialism generally raise the eyebrow of polite company and may even elicit a stiff reproach. Even the most felicitous of 19th century adornments (whalebone corsets, pith helmets) are rarely seen on the street today. I suppose that all it takes is a couple of opium wars to tarnish the reputation of an entire era.

Be that as it may, there is one relic of Queen Victoria’s reign that remains as indispensable today as it was 150 years ago: the gin and tonic. Maybe it’s just my spats talking, but as far as I’m concerned, its astringent zing is the taste of civilization itself. Wine has the dubious distinction of being prehistoric — even Palaeolithic nomads could make a reasonable facsimile of Beaujolais, given some crushed fruit and a hollow rock where it can ferment in peace. However, it would hardly occur to a caveman to juxtapose bitterness, citrus and effervescence in a tumbler of Waterford crystal. In other words, gin and tonic is the kind of complex cuisine that only the better sort of Empire could devise.

The G&T’s strange flavours are a relic of the British occupation of the malarial parts of the world. In order to stave off the disease, British army officers were fed a steady diet of quinine, a pharmaceutical extract from the Peruvian cinchona tree. To make this bitter drug easier to swallow, the officers would add sugar and soda water. Somehow, gin leaked into this “tonic” and the dosage migrated to the cocktail hour. As Winston Churchill said, "The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire."