Spring is the best and worst time of year for me. Alive with colour. Vibrant with birdsong. But dead to the nostrils and taste buds.
That’s because, like three million other people in this country I have anosmia : I can’t taste and have no sense of smell.
As a result, the scent of lilac, the flavour of new-season asparagus and the smell of a freshly cut lawn are denied to me.
It began after a nasty accident while I was waiting for a train at Grantham station more than 30 years ago. I was scheduled for a meeting at the BBC TV centre in Leeds but a flu-like cold had left me heavily congested and a bit dizzy.
Challenge: Tony Francis, from Chesham, Buckinghamshire, has lived without his sense of smell for three decades after a freak accident in the 1980s
For the first time in my life, I collapsed. My business partner who was travelling with me, said I hit the floor like a felled oak. The back of my head took the full force.
I was taken to Grantham Hospital with a suspected fractured skull and was out cold for five hours. They summoned my wife from Hertfordshire.
Fortunately, I recovered consciousness and was allowed home the next day. They told me the injury would heal in time, but I soon realised that I couldn’t taste my food or smell things.
I did a taste test at a private clinic. Sugar and salt were the only things I could identify. Anything more subtle was lost on me. The blow, I was told, had damaged the olfactory nerve that transmits odour impulses from the upper nasal passage to the brain. It’s not just trauma that can do this; so too can chronic sinusitis and post-viral complications.
The consultant said taste and smell were more or less the same thing. I’d lost both but retained a degree of mouth taste, the tiny percentage which doesn’t depend on smell. I was told there was no cure. It affects the quality of life. When two of your senses go missing, the range of stimuli narrows.
Food and drink obviously lose their appeal and being unaware of your own smell is strange. It makes you acutely conscious of personal hygiene. I avoid garlic wherever possible because I don’t want to offend others by smelling of something I can’t detect myself.
My anosmia happened to coincide with the start of a new ITV series, Heart Of The Country, which I’d produce and present for the next 25 years.
Enthusing about the bouquet of a flower meadow or the rich aromas of autumn was challenging. Was that farmyard as whiffy as it looked? I relied on cameramen and sound recordists to mark my card.
Impact: The blow has permanently damaged the olfactory nerve that transmits odour impulses from the upper nasal passage to the brain
Viewers never knew, of course. Nor did I have the heart to tell our camp-fire chef that none of the myriad dishes we ‘enjoyed’ over the years made much of an impression. Jugged hare, baked squirrel, rabbit in a drainpipe were all the same to me.
The only exception was a sauce we made from the root of a horseradish plant so fiery it would have blown the doors off a tithe barn. Otherwise I faked it.
Surprisingly, anosmics outnumber the blind and deaf — but partly because it’s not as debilitating as loss of sight or sound, it goes under the radar.
Yet, according to research by Professor Carl Philpott, a consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon at John Paget University Hospital in Norfolk, almost half of those affected suffer depression, anxiety or relationship difficulties. Sometimes all three, because they feel locked out of the real world.
I’m lucky. I belong to the other half. Of course, I’d love to smell flowers, baking bread and breakfast coffee. Soap, too. Cussons Imperial Leather was a favourite. I’d love to be aware of my partner’s perfume and the smell of her hair and skin, but I’ve learned to live without those
