Sunday senses
a scent, a sight, a touch, a taste, a sound
Is it just me, or is listing the five senses in quick succession not as easy as it ought to be? Even though I use each of the senses every day, in every moment, whenever I try to list them out, as I have in this subtitle, there’s always one (a different one each time) that I momentarily blank on. It happened when I set myself a challenge this morning on my walk to find something for each sense to share with you.
Once I’d completed that first part of the challenge – of actually remembering what all the senses are – I looked out … and sniffed and listened and stuck my tongue in the air and my hands in front of me. A harmless zombie on a Sunday morning.
Scent
Wham! Immediately intoxicated by an incredible smell of jasmine from, not a jasmine, but a massive glossy-leafed shrubby tree (or treey shrub):
An osmanthus? I think it’s Fortune’s Osmanthus aka sweet olive. But I’m happy to be corrected if anyone thinks it’s another member of that crew. Anyway, when I googled osmanthus after I got back home, it popped up on lots of perfumery websites; the first result said that the word osmanthus means ‘fragrant flower’ in Greek and that ‘the scent of the osmanthus flower is slightly jasmine, with sensual accents and therefore slightly animal-like. This floral and fruity fragrance is so strong that it spreads several metres around the shrub.’1 I can vouch for that – it fills the air. A heady start to the walk.
Sight
There were quite a few to choose from in the sight category. One favourite was seeing a poster for a Santa’s grotto at a nearby dairy farm offering the opportunity to, and I quote, ‘meet Santa and some of his calves and cows’ plus ‘unlimited tractor rides in the dark with Santa’s elves’.
However, the sight I’ve selected in this game of eye-spy is this beautiful blue sky above St Catherine’s Hill here in Winchester, with two converging contrails. I had to look up that word for ‘line that a plane makes in the sky’ and promptly went down the rabbit hole of ‘surely a con(densation) trail is not just made up of condensation?’, which led me to the government web page for ‘contrail FAQs’ (yes, there is one!); it includes info on weather modification and ‘cloud seeding’ which I hadn’t heard of until today but which I now have many (philosophical) questions about.2
For the purposes of this post though, back to that pretty view, which was very welcome after what has seemed the greyest Novemeber I’ve ever known (including only eighteen minutes of sunshine, in total, in its first eleven days).
Touch
Does it count if the touch tick-box was something I felt with my feet? And when I say feet I mean the soles of my walking trainers. Hmm, now that I’m writing that I guess it doesn’t quite meet the criteria for touch. But it is a texture, and a feeling. It’s tacky mud. You know the mud I mean. The kind that isn’t too squelchy, isn’t too cakey. Just a perfect centimetre or so of stickiness that feels great to walk on.
Taste
I had packed snacks! But, I didn’t eat them (it was not long after breakfast) so for taste I’m going for the deliciously cold water from my stainless-steel bottle.
The Wikipedia page for water says that ‘pure water is usually described as tasteless and odorless, although humans have specific sensors that can feel the presence of water in their mouths, and frogs are known to be able to smell it.’
So, I’ve managed to pick a tasteless thing for the taste category. However, I live in a kettle-breaking area of hard water, so it certainly has a minerally limescaley flavour. I’m not really selling this one to you, am I?
Sound
I heard a robin. Its chittering call, rather than its song. It then hopped into view, perhaps wondering if it could have those snacks I mentioned, if I wasn’t going to. Being able to recognise a bird sound is immensely satisfying. Occassionally I hear an owl at night and, when I learnt that it was the sound of a tawny owl (the owl that makes the classic ‘twit’ and ‘twoo’, which is the call of the female and the reply of the male), it made it so lovely drifting off to sleep being able to think of exactly who (whoooo) it was making that sound.
