So, I will create a signature scent. I plan to build it, this perfume of my self, from the base notes up. The method will be simple. Identifying one note at a time, adding and subtracting notes as I go along, I will sniff and test my way to completion. The perfume will gather together all the strands of my life and tell me who I am. And when I have finished I will recognise myself once more. I will be Siân, scented.

BASE NOTES

AS A CHILD, I SPENT MANY AFTERNOONS PLAYING ALONE IN my grandparents’ Waltham garden, a small strip of damp turf overshadowed by the Christchurch gasworks. Granny Seren was short and fat, compact, with bright white hair. She was deaf – a result of being sent to work as a weaver in the Lancashire mills when she was fourteen. The bulky battery of her hearing aid was pinned and tucked into her bra and because of that her blouse had a strange angular outline. I was fascinated by the mystery of my grandmother’s mechanical inner workings, a feature emphasised by the beige-coloured, twisted wire that connected the old-fashioned aid to her ear-piece.

When Granny Seren had time she would join me outside and we would stare in silence at the gasometers with the same kind of bewildered wonderment that movie actors adopt when looking at alien spaceships.

‘It’s so stinky,’ I’d complain.

‘The gas?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. It reminds me of when we moved to Manchester to live with my aunt after my dad died. The air was so dirty compared to Wales.’

‘I don’t understand how the towers can go up and down. They were tall last week, and now they only reach halfway up.’

‘That’s true, cariad,’ said my granny.

Every single time I visited I asked my grandmother to explain how the gas-holders were able to change height, but she didn’t know and she wasn’t bothered. ‘It’s science,’ she’d say, before leading me inside to the kitchen where a saucepan of black tea sat simmering on the stove.