What are the evocative smells of summer for you? Spring brings the scent of flowers. What do we get in summer?
We get the smell of sun screen. I went for a spin today around lunchtime - the mercury was nudging 31 at the time, so I did the old slip-slop-slap thing. It's been so long since we last used sun screen, every bottle of 30SPF in the house had gone bad. I can understand milk going off, but sun screen?
A fresh bottle of sun screen has that certain smell - a smell of beaches and BBQs and mosquito repellant. It goes with drinking beer at the cricket, or lying on a blowup mattress in the pool, idly floating this way and that, and dreading the moment when one of your siblings will race out of the house and soak you with a bombie.
(As an aside, as kids we used to put our old blowup mattresses in the pool and then throw the cat onto them. The cat would push out its claws to gain traction on the mattress, and then slowly go down like the captain of the Titanic.)
The fresh sun screen seems to have done its job. The thermometer on the bike was showing 39 degrees when I got home, which meant 90 minutes baking under a ferocious sun. I am still as milky white as a Pom just off the plane in Spain. Another day keeping skin cancer at bay.
(In case you are wondering, my $80 bike computer has a built in thermometer. It tells me how fast I am going, how fast I am pedaling - cadence - how far I have ridden since I installed the computer, my trip time, my trip distance, me average speed and my maximum speed. Amazing the number of features that they pack into these tiny little things in this day and age. I have just passed the 15,000km mark on this bike. It's good to know these things).
1 comment:
2 summer smells when I was growing up in Five Dock - night jasmine, and rotting sea weed on the shores of the Bay. Bayside houses were cheap for that reason, and the noisy Cabarita boat races every Sunday.
Gentrification really started up with the mineral boom late 60's.
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