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Available for over a year

The street where I live will feel a bit different in a few weeks’ time. More precisely, the air will have changed. For nearly fifty years, an industrial scale bakery has been producing bread to feed a significant slice of the country. Now it’s to close and 176 people will be looking for jobs. Our loss is nothing compared with theirs; but we’ll miss it, all the same. No longer will we be enveloped in one of life’s most comforting smells, the incomparable fragrance of freshly baked bread. I’ve known it since I collected the still-hot loaves from a bakehouse up the road as a child, nibbling the corners as I raced home, and I can understand why people are encouraged today to get that same smell lingering when they’re showing their house to prospective buyers. Smells can mine deep memories - newly mown grass, maybe, sweet peas, richly polished wood, a child’s embrace. It can work the opposite way, of course, if the memories triggered are grim ones. Not every aroma is welcome - certainly not the choking fumes of a traffic queue, a crammed commuter carriage, the sweat of raw fear as families wait anxiously in an A and E department. Not surprisingly, there’s a huge industry dedicated to the masking of smells: perfumes and body lotions, aftershave, disinfectants, air fresheners, and after death bodies are embalmed. Cleanliness might not actually rank next to godliness, but it can make life more pleasant. St.Paul told the Christians at Philippi that their practical support was ‘like a sweet-smelling offering to God’ - there’s more to fragrance than the physical variety, and it’s good to be alive to it. I’ve never forgotten a visit to Garbage City in Cairo. It’s populated mostly by Coptic Christians who survive by collecting the waste of the Egyptian capital, sorting it and selling it on for recycling. Rubbish is piled everywhere you look, in the narrow lanes between the high apartment blocks, inside people’s homes, on the flat roofs. The smell is inescapable and unforgettable, and so is the poverty beneath it. Yet week by week thousands of these often despised people share in worship in the vast church cut into a hillside cave. Despite the desperateness of their situation, they give thanks for love received, and are assured that they matter to God. The place around them might literally stink, but their faithfulness offers a fragrance which can’t be matched by the most expensive perfume, or even the freshest batch of farmhouse loaves. In the unlikeliest places, we need to wake up and sniff what’s really in the air.