Intermittences

Hoofed it down to the flat, to start work on cleaning the tiles before oiling them with linseed oil (the local tradition here). As I walked, I suddenly started thinking about an old Mr Walker, a one-armed ex-lightship sailor who rented out rowing boats by the hour in Holyhead when I was little. Why did I suddenly think of him, some fifty years later?

In my haversack, alongside the ammoniac for stripping the old finish, and the linseed oil, was a plastic canister of turpentine. It had started to leak, gently but aromatically, through my haversack. The smell, which I hadn't experienced in fifty years or so (being of the white spirit and turps substitute generation myself), was that of his boatyard, where he cleaned his brushes with turpentine.

If Proust had had a Holyhead childhood, his intermittences du coeur would have been a bit more peremptory than the smell of fresh madeleines.