Everyone knows how evocative smells can be - the smell of freshly baked biscuits that drift you back to childhood in mum’s kitchen, the smell of first rains on a boiled tarmac road that float you back home if you were lucky to live in a hot country and so on.  And every city has it’s own smells – take Kiev for example. 

There is something unmistakably cabbagey, mixed with sweat and laced with diesel.  And if you live in my apartment block you have the additional welcome in the foyer (i.e. bombed out looking dusty stairwell) of lashings of chicken shed mingled with the throat-choking muck spray odour that is equated with the English countryside.

Chicken shed? Muck spray?  How can this be, living in a civilised (ahem) city?  This might help explain:

me: hi ludmilla. Oof, what is that terrible smell?  I feel like I’m going to choke.

ludmilla (from the agency next door): that is bleach.

me: oh – someone’s cleaning the stairwell with bleach?

ludmilla: yes, in winter these people come to sleep in cellar so we have to take them out.

me: oh?  The poor people? (i.e. tramps)

ludmilla: yes.  We throw bucket of water down in cellar and they come out. Hahahahaha.

me: oh.  That’s not very nice.  Where will they go if they can’t sleep in our cellar? (of course I know the answer but I like stringing these things out – to see whether people really can be this mean and besides, it makes for a longer blog post.).

ludmilla: hahaha they go to some other apartments! (that’s right, pass the problem onto someone else).

me: well, I suppose the men smell quite bad, but they aren’t really doing any harm are they?  I mean, what are they supposed to do when it’s -10C outside and they have nowhere to sleep?

ludmilla: if you see these people you must throw bucket of water down in cellar. Ah no! Not you - MDF must do it! Hahahaha!