Button number: 32

Name: Stephen Baker

Age: 45

Entry: August 2005, Blandford Forum

A smell is a place in time. My father used to have a cardigan with a button just like this. He’s had it a long time, it was hand knitted but I don’t know by whom. It smelled of everything that was him. It smelled of his smell and his aftershave and pipe and tobacco and finest Marino wool. When I was 4 or 5 I used to snuggle into his arms, breath deeply this warm wonderful smell and feel the safest I’ve ever felt in my life. I was a small child and innocent and all was right with the world. I am older now and he is dead and I am damaged and sullied, as all of us are by growing up and the real world.

But when I close my eyes and think about long ago I can still remember that smell, that smell I called ‘Daddy smell’.