During a slippering I received at primary school in the late sixties, I recall vividly the smell of hot rubber during and immediately following the punishment. In the top class at the time, I had been sent to the head along with a friend for allegedly being negligent in playtime prefecting duties. The head had arrived, taken us into his office and retrieved his "slipper" from the desk. He then bent me over where I stood and gave me four quite hard whacks across my shorts with the rubber soled black plimsoll. He then turned to my friend who was right next to me, and did the same to him. As the third and fourth strokes landed on his shorts, I caught a long whiff of hot rubber, a smell that has stayed with me ever since. I heard once that an F1 racing driver remembered smelling newly mown hay just before his car crashed into the wall on a bend - his wheels had momentarily run over a grass verge. This was put down to his sense of smell being heightened with his emotional state and concentration level.

Do you think that this is what happened with me? Or can anybody explain the physics behind this? I was certainly quite emotional, feeling at the time wrongly accused, and the slippering was perhaps harder than usual. (Also, I’m sure that the slipper was not really getting hot after just eight whacks!)

Plimsoll were made of good empire rubber in those
days, and it did heat up very easily. At my approved
school we had the cane over PE shorts, but the PE
instructor sometmes used a plimsoll on the bare, and
that gave off a burning rubber smell. In fact the
gym used to smell a bit like that, maybe all the rubber
plimsolls on the wood floor.

Which approved school were you at Andy?

I think that what you experienced is quite common in that momentous events do tend to have associations to peripherals.

I know someone who has a thing about orange rugs, because that is what he saw whilst over his aunt's knee!

Presumably, therefore, readers of these hallowed pages will eventually develop an unnatural attraction to pork pies?