the school smell

Do you know what the “school smell” is? It’s that unmistakable odour that permeates every single bus that plies a route going past schools (particularly secondary schools) in the afternoon after classes end and the students are going home.

It’s a smell quite unlike any other. It certainly isn’t pleasant by any stretch of imagination, but it’s not exactly as repugnant as body odour either. It’s just this almost exotic sort of smell that attacks our olfactory receptors whenever a few secondary school students gather. It doesn’t matter which school they’re from, this is a syndrome that afflicts all secondary school students regardless of whether they’re in a neighbourhood school or an elite school. Quite egalitarian, this smell.

The existence of this smell was first brought to my attention when I was still of school-going age. Whenever I reached home after school, my mother would demand that I immediately take a shower because “you have that school smell!”.

I never used to believe it existed because I couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary whenever I sniffed my body or school uniform, but that was probably because I’d become immune to the smell, having been exposed to it on a daily basis.

However, that belief was soon destroyed when I began my tertiary education. Taking the bus home on days when lectures ended in the early afternoon meant that I would have to share the bus with many secondary school students, and believe you me, the smell is real. It is viciously real.

There were only some periods of respite, and one of them is upon us now. If you notice that the malls in Orchard Road and City Hall are particularly crowded, that’s because the “school smell” has cleared from buses and trains for a week – the March school holidays are upon us.

True, it may only be a temporary respite (the March holidays only last a week, in case you’ve forgotten) and public transport will soon smell again, but take heart and be thankful for one thing.

For this one week, we will not have to worry about smelling a smell far worse than the “school smell”. I am, of course, talking about the one and only “My last period was P.E. and I’m still wearing my sweat-soaked, belacan-scented P.E. T-shirt” smell.

Count your blessings, people. Count your blessings.