This is England
The smell is somewhere between the back seat of a hot car and spilt earth, as if an oil fire has been choked with damp rocks.
Apparently the technical word for the smell of rain is ‘petrichor’, from the Greek petros, meaning stone, and īchōr, the substance that was said to pump around the veins of Greek gods. It’s a funny old phrase, ‘I can smell the rain.’ What it should really be is, ‘I can smell the rain is coming.’
I don’t know if petrichor has an opposite, but there’s certainly a summery yin smell to its heavens-bursting yang. The day is early and I can already smell the sun is coming, the air drawing closer like gathering grass clippings. If the fields’ bleached stubble and cracked furrows are to be believed, by midday we will actually need shade. We live, of course, in ‘unprecedented times’, to which today this tropical-feeling Kent is no stranger.
Roads unknown
Joe is from around here and,
