The Scent of New Mown Grass

I was suddenly hit by the scent of newly mown grass this afternoon, as I walked past a garden.  All sorts of childhood memories came flooding back, triggered by the smell.  For me, this scent is forever associated with summers in the 1970s, when I was a child and suffered badly from hay fever.  For me, it always heralded the onset of a season I dreaded as I knew it would trigger my allergy, leaving me congested, wheezing and gasping for breath.  Because of the debilitating effect of the hay fever, I never really enjoyed my childhood summers, dreading them, in fact.  But eventually I outgrew the hay fever, which barely troubles me these days, and have learned to love summer, looking forward to its arrival every year.  Nonetheless, today's unexpected encounter with the scent of new mown grass brought all the bad memories back.  It's fascinating how we associate particular sensations with, not just past events, but also past emotional states.  The smell of wet tarmac, for instance, always takes me back to happier childhood feelings, reminding me of rainy break times at infant school, waiting for the rain to ease enough to go out into the playground (which were inevitably covered in tarmac back then).  I can still feel the excitement and expectation when that smell hits my nostrils.

Of course, the question arises as to just how accurate the memories these stimuli evoke actually are - did damp break times always make me happy, was every summer an ordeal for me, or am I latching on to particular powerful fragments of memory and magnifying their significance?  There's no doubt that we view our memories through all manner of filters, often influenced by the way in which popular culture portrays the era we are recalling.  In The Guardian recently, Charlie Brooker highlighted how some cinema goers had received a trailer for Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie negatively, complaining that the 48 frames per second process used to shoot it, (it's twice the normal speed for feature films), made the footage look too 'real', like 1980s videotape.  As he noted, the problem is that audiences are so used to seeing the glossy 24 framers per second  footage of contemporary movies, they assume that it represents cinematic 'reality'.  The videotape images familiar to those of us who watched TV in the 1980s is, arguably, a better representation of 'reality', with its over lit look and its apparent lack of depth (both foreground and background seem to stay in focus simultaneously).  Indeed, its the way I remember the 1980s looking.  But do I only 'remember' them looking this way because every moving image of them presented on TV looks that way due to the video systems used back then? 

Despite living through them, and knowing that the world looked no different than it does now, I still have trouble remembering that the 1970s didn't look as if it had been shot on grainy film footage or the flat (and slightly out of focus) videotape used then.  It's even worse when it comes to imagining eras you didn't experience personally: I have to constantly remind myself that the 1930s and 1940s weren't in black and white. It was just cinema photography, not real life, that lacked colour back then.  What's really interesting is that we're able to make the distinction between the two with regard to life as we experience it in the present.  Nowadays everything is shot digitally on tape and filters are applied to it in post-production to replicate the frame rate of film and give it that 'glossy' look we associate with modern cinema.  Yet we 'know' that the cinematic looking news reports and contemporary TV dramas we see aren't 'real' - we don't expect to step outside of our front doors and find everything looking like it was shot on film.  Or do we?  Maybe that's why so many people these days seem so dissatisfied with the reality of their lives, and are always striving after wealth and/or fame.  Perhaps they think that if they are rich enough, or famous enough, their perceptions of life will suddenly be shot on 70mm film?  Who knows?