]Watford Museum presents...
Goal-den Years
A celebration of the history of Watford Football Club through collections and exhibitions of memorabilia and memories
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Memories:
The Smell of Fried Onions
By Olly Wicken
In Michael Powell's 1946 film, A Matter of Life and Death, David Niven portrays an RAF pilot who begins to have spells of altered consciousness and hallucinations in which an angel appears to him. The arrival of this Heavenly Messenger is always preceded by the smell of fried onions.
This was not mere filmic fantasy. In 1899, in an article in the journal Brain, the distinguished Hughlings Jackson had described epileptic attacks preceded not only by a crude sensation of smell but also by a dreamy state. The patient in question had symptoms pointing to gross organic disease of the right temporo-sphenoidal lobe. (Brain 1899; xxii: 534-549.)
What's this got to do with anything? Well, every other Saturday as I walk down Vicarage Road, I smell fried onions. I'm in a dreamy state.
Clearly there are two alternatives. Either Ross Jenkins, Luther Blissett, John Barnes, Tommy Mooney, Danny Webber and many others were, and are, heavenly messengers. Or I need my head examined.
Added to the exhibition on 05/10/2004