Holiday Time

So, I'm finally on my holidays.  I suppose, technically, I've been on holiday since I finished work on Friday, but to me the weekend is always the weekend, regardless of whether I'm on holiday or not: it exists as an entity in its own right, separate from what goes on during the week.  Except when it's a Bank Holiday weekend, of course, when it most definitely is a holiday.   But to return to the point, I counted today as being, officially, the start of my Summer holidays and it got off to the worst possible start, with me oversleeping badly, only awoken by the postman knocking on the front door, trying to deliver a parcel.  (It was a Wrenn rolling chassis I'd bought on eBay to repair one of my locomotives, arriving far earlier than I expected).  Which meant that I started out for the beach hours later than I had intended and, what with traffic, road works and the like, meant that I didn't arrive there until late afternoon.  But I got there and allowed myself to be soothed by the sound of the sea crashing on the shore, which is the important thing.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'd spent most of last week thinking about being on that beach, so it was a relief to finally be there.

But the thing is, there's this smell.  I can't really describe it, yet wherever I go, I can smell it.  Which implies that it is me.  Except that I bathe regularly and, what with all the hot weather we've been having, I'm pretty much smothered in deodorant.  Besides, it just doesn't smell like me, (or my deodorant), and I've certainly had no complaints from those I've been in close contact with of late.  Then I remembered that, as a result of my long absence from work earlier this year, due to illness, my sense of smell had started to come back.  Due to the fact that, for the past too many years I've had to enter some pretty disgusting premises for work related purposes, I'd simply stopped smelling some things.  I'm not sure whether the sensitivity of my sense of smell had deteriorated or whether, subconsciously, I had learned to block out certain ranges of smells, but there were a lot of odours that simply no longer registered with me.  So, it occurred to me, with my sense of smell restored, perhaps what I've been smelling is the smell of Summer.  A smell that, for the past God knows how many years, I've been blocking out.  Well, that's what I'm telling myself, at least.