Things reek, stink and pong – but why are there no verbs for describing a delightful odour? | Adrian Chiles

We don’t have a single verb to express smelling something nice. Welsh and Croatian, by contrast, are never caught short when something fragrant gets right up your nose

I remember the first time I remembered a smell. This was remembering to the extent that it stopped me in my tracks, taking me back to a specific moment, a specific place and a specific feeling. The smell was that of a bike shop. Mainly rubber, with notes of oil and plastic and a strong hint of sheer excitement. In that instant I was about 10 years old, in Bache Brothers Cycles at Lye Cross, near Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. My grandad was next to me, with the shop man. I was getting a bike for my birthday.

When I was talking about the power of smell on the radio, Speth, a Welsh speaker from Manchester, got in touch to say that in Welsh you can hear a smell as well as smell it. At first this sounded charming, if far-fetched. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. While I can’t – in English, anyway – exactly hear the smell of that Black Country bike shop in 1977, I can smell, hear and see it very clearly. I can feel it too. I can feel the shop man’s grip as he lifts me into the saddle. And I can hear him saying to my grandad: “Blimey, he’s a lump, isn’t he?” Ever sensitive about my weight, that was a sour note. But I’ll let it pass, because all I can feel, then and now, is the general joy.