Petites Madeleines

Marcel Proust famously wrote (in Stephen Hudson's translation; sorry, I speak no French):

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. 

My recent episode of olfactory-induced autobiographical memory, as psychologists would call that, was, sadly, more unpleasant, albeit perhaps not that intense: I recently bought a bottle of hand sanitizer (store brand of a more or less pan-European chain - others I ran out of were bought in a local pharmacy, and of different brand), something we go through rapidly in these strange times. I used it this morning for the first time, and was immediately and quite strongly struck by flashback of my rather unpleasant two week stay in hospital for a bad case of erysipelas. It turned out I used the same brand then, both in hospital and during my rather prolonged convalescence. 

Strange machines, our brains...