Smells of my childhood

I'm one of those people who lives through the nose. I just love delicious smelling things. I love perfumes and incense, air-fresheners, pot-pourri and Febreze. I could spend all day at the Men's Perfume wall at Myer, and I can talk about colognes the way some bores can talk about wine. When a new men's fragrance is released I always run to get a tester and to see if it's going to be "me" or not. It almost always is.
What can I say? I'm an addict. I simply don't understand people who can't stand perfume - you might as well say you don't like food, or don't like reading. People who can exist in such states are simply incomprehensible to me. A world without beautiful, extravagantly artificial, smells would not be worth living in. I always ache for the courts of Heian Japan, when the concubines would sit around having incense smelling parties (when they weren't having moon viewing parties, or peony observing parties).
These days, of course, I get my olfactory kicks from the more expensive design houses. But I have to confess that I still love - and yearn for - the more down-market aromas of my childhood.
In a really primal way I adore the smell of Johnson & Johnson's baby powder. Poor little babies are forbidden to go near it these days, of course.
My grandmother and her sisters always smelled of Tame hair conditioner and, when going to town, Cedel hairspray. More glamorous occasions called for liberal doses of Tabu, 4711 or any of the Yardley range. My mother's generation preferred Charlie, or later the canned delights of Impulse or Australis.
And of course, we must never underestimate the influence of Avon, with its delicious scents bottled in the most extraordinary containers - boys with balloons, fan-wielding geisha and small green frogs.
Men, of course, gloried in the accumulated haze of Old Spice, Brut 33 and Blue Stratos.
Smelling any of these things is enough to plunge me all the way back to the nursery, and I secretly hope the production of them will go on forever - though I fear that Tame long ago disappeared.