Death Sticks

I came downstairs this morning convinced I had no stories.

I'd been awake since before half past seven, although I hadn't seen Ste before he left for work. Instead, I'd done the thing I know I shouldn't do: picked up my phone.

Bad juju. Especially with an ADHD brain. There's something about giving your phone the first part of your morning that seems to tell your brain, *This. This is what we're doing today.* Scrolling. Consuming. Reacting. And yet, apparently, I never learn.

So I lay there for a while looking at things, forming strong opinions about things I had absolutely no business having strong opinions about before breakfast, until eventually I came downstairs.

I'd seen a couple of videos about people losing their dogs, which was enough to send me immediately towards mine. I've already lost several dogs in my lifetime. I know what that particular grief feels like. So Bob Bob got cuddles. Gussy got cuddles. Bob is nuzzled into me even as I write this.

The house is incredibly quiet. The girls are still asleep. I've opened the bedroom curtains and cracked the window so that the early autumn air can move through the house. It's cool this morning. Properly nippy. The sort of air that feels like summer has quietly packed its things while nobody was looking.

And I'm thinking: I've got nothing in my head. No stories. Nothing particularly interesting to say. Which, considering the way my brain normally operates, is quite an unusual feeling.

I'm waiting to start ADHD medication for the first time in my life. Forty-two years of living with my brain exactly as it is, and I've finally reached the point of wondering what life might feel like with a little help. Perhaps I'll become more routined. God knows I'm not very good at that.

But this morning, while everyone slept, I decided I could at least attempt some kind of ritual. I couldn't put the kettle on because I didn't want to wake the girls. No tea. No black coffee. So what else could I do? I'd already done my two minutes on the trampoline to wake myself up and get everything moving. I wanted to clear the room. Clear yesterday. Let some new air in.

So I lit an incense stick. Nag Champa.

And there it was. The story I apparently didn't have.

Because the second Nag Champa begins to burn, I'm somewhere else.

The first place is Plymouth. I can still remember the first time I smelled it. I was visiting my friend Karen, who lived in the most phenomenal flat built into an old fort. Beautiful brick walls. Immaculate design. And in one room, what appeared to be two enormous white wall panels — except when you pushed them, they opened. Bedrooms. Actual hidden bedrooms behind the walls. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Then Karen answered the door wearing a leopard-print bikini and a sarong, looking absolutely incredible, and I remember thinking: God, this woman is fabulous. There really wasn't another word for her.

And floating through this already impossibly cool apartment was a smell I had never experienced before. Warm. Sweet. Earthy. Smoky. Nag Champa. I was obsessed from that moment onwards. It became my smell.

Years later, when I had my sexual wellness business and worked with people through bodywork, Nag Champa burned in the room. I wanted clients to step through the door and feel that they had entered somewhere different. Somewhere they could come out of their heads and into their bodies. Scent helped create that boundary. The outside world was out there. This was in here. Nag Champa became part of the experience.

It has followed me through different versions of myself ever since. I light it when I want to cleanse a room. I use it when I'm doing something a little witchy. Sometimes I save the ashes. I take packets of it with me on picnics — stick one into the ground, light it, and let the smoke drift around us while everyone sits on blankets and grass, eating and talking and existing together. I give packets of it to people. If I love something, apparently everybody else is getting some too.

I have tried other incense. I have. But I don't like it. Most incense smells like toilet cleaner to me — that artificial floral smell that suggests somebody is desperately trying to disguise something horrific that has happened in a downstairs loo.

Nag Champa is different. Nag Champa smells like home.

Which is unfortunate because I married a man who absolutely hates it.

Ste had been around the smell plenty when we were first together, because my business operated from my apartment. He never said anything. Not once. It wasn't until we moved in together and I brought my beloved incense with me that his true feelings were revealed. I lit one. He walked into the room and said something along the lines of, "Oh God. You've got your death smell on again."

My death smell. Years of ritual, memory, grounding, bodywork, friendship and spirituality. Reduced immediately to: death smell.

He calls them my death sticks now.

And I suppose a sensible person might have decided that if their husband hated something that much, perhaps they could find another incense.

Absolutely not. There are compromises in marriage. Nag Champa isn't one of mine.

Neither, unfortunately for Ste, are onions and garlic — another one of my favourite smells in the entire world. That moment when they hit the heat and the whole kitchen fills with them. I could bottle it. Ste thinks it is revolting.

So there is now an established hierarchy of offensive smells in our house. Nag Champa is terrible. Frying onions and garlic are worse. Which has created one of my favourite domestic moments: I'll be standing at the cooker, happily frying onions and garlic, when Ste appears looking personally victimised by dinner, and says, "Oh God. I hate that smell more than the death smell. Put your death sticks on." And so Nag Champa — a scent he apparently despises — is summoned to rescue him from another smell he despises even more.

Marriage.

I suppose everybody has smells that belong to their life. Freshly cut grass. Petrol. The smell of my nana's cleaning products when she gets into the car and says hello to me. They're not simply smells anymore. They're places. People. Versions of myself.

And perhaps that's the funny thing about believing you have nothing in your head. Sometimes you don't need to go looking for a story. You just need to open a window. Light something. Let the smoke rise. And see where it takes you.