Frank McNally: Scents of humour

I thought it was a spoof recently when a spam email arrived in my inbox purporting to be from a perfume company called “House of Sillage”. The attached press release concerned a launch, in California, of the label’s “inaugural men’s collection”, in particular its “signature” scent: “Dignified by House of Sillage”.

And even as I read these words, sure enough, an imaginary scent was invading my nostrils. But it wasn’t the one the emailers had in mind. I should explain that where I grew up, for reasons unclear, the fermented grass product known elsewhere as “silage” was pronounced as if it had two “l”s. Maybe it was because, as such, it rhymed with “tillage”.

So for me, the image of a “House of Sillage” evoked one of those concrete pits where farmers used to pile fresh-cut grass, then compact it and add molasses before covering it with plastic, clamped down by tyres.

The result, come winter, would be a nutrient-rich but also very aromatic substance: sweet, musky, not at all unpleasant, although probably not the sort of scent that could be sold as aftershave.

Amid this intensely Proustian moment, I was also reading the House of Sillage’s description of its new product as “a striking composition of fortified masculinity”.

Which would be a fair description of the smell of mature silage too; although if you caught a whiff of that fortified masculinity off yourself on the way to the Saturday-night disco, you might want to go back and spend another 45 minutes in the shower.

As I now know, of course, the “sillage” in the perfume company’s name is a French word, and therefore pronounced “see-l’age” meaning “slipstream”.

And if the manufacturers are to be believed, the slipstream of their men’s scent is a “perfectly tailored balance of robust agar wood with compelling traces of smoked vetiver and sultry vanilla”. If that’s not enough, there’s an “elegant spice veil of saffron and aged clove” in there somewhere too.

Cut grass

So it sounds as if any resemblance to silage is minimal. Although funnily enough, according to my dictionary, vetiver is a kind of “fragrant grass”, from India.

The singer Mundy is right, by the way. July is synonymous with the smells left behind by mowing machines. As he puts it in his hymn to the month: “July please, I’m on my knees, the smell of you, fresh-cut grass . . .”

I was being driven around the back roads of Cavan and Monaghan last weekend and, yes, the aroma of cut grass was everywhere. Well, not quite everywhere. In fact, there was an olfactory tug-of-war going on between the fields that had been mown and not refertilised and the ones already sprayed with slurry: a smell that all the perfumeries in France could not make pleasant.

Slurry

There, by the way, is another word that means very different things in different countries. It started out as a general description of liquid mixtures, especially cement. But in the US, it’s not unusual to be offered “slurry” for dessert or as a sauce on your dinner. If you’re Irish, that would be a Proustian moment and a half.

I just hope the slurry-spreading season has peaked by the time of the Inniskeen Road July Evening festival on the 11th of this month, otherwise the bicycles might be going by in twos and threes a bit faster than the organisers planned.

Alas I won’t be there this year because of a competing engagement on the same date in South Tipperary, where the Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, which starts today, will be working itself up to a climax.

I’m doing a public interview with the writer John McCourt about his book on Anthony Trollope’s time in Ireland, which included three years in Clonmel and a friendship with that town’s famous adopted son, Charles Bianconi.

But I'm amused to see that elsewhere in the festival's eclectic programme is a play called Charolais, written by and starring Noni Stapleton. An award-winner at last year's Dublin Fringe, it's described as "a surreal comedy about love, longing and one woman's intense rivalry with a Charolais heifer" which seems to be vying for her man's affections.

Although I haven't seen it yet, I can understand her plight. As I remember it, those Charolais heifers are good-looking animals. They're French. They're blonde. And their fragrance has a certain je ne sais quoi, although no doubt the marketing department of the House of Sillage would call it "a striking composition of fortified femininity". @FrankmcnallyIT