Ian Moore – The smell of diesel

Simon: So, this thing about the diesel and it being in your clothes and almost built into your skin. When you got off the submarine, that was a thing was it?

Oh yeah, you open up one of those hatches and there’s like this blue haze will come out of it and the smell of diesel is impregnated into your skin.

You can’t get rid of it. It takes years for it to disappear.

Simon: Literally?

Literally years. I mean to this day, I’ve still got a kit bag in the loft that if I open it, I can still smell diesel.

Simon: And what does that trigger for you, smelling that?

It takes me right back, right back to those days, it really does. I’ve got a diesel car and every time I go to fill it up and I get the smell of diesel as I’m filling up the car, it evokes all those memories straight back in again.

As for the diesel side of things, I mean in a previous house, in the garage, I had my own wardrobe, I had my own washing machine, my own tumble dryer and I built in a shower into the garage.

Simon: For coming home.

For coming home and I went straight into the garage, everything came off, everything was put through the washing machine at least two or three times because it absolutely hummed.

I would shower probably at least twice, get everything off and then shower again, get everything off, and then my other half would bring out some clean clothes from the house and that’s when I would actually go into the house.

Everything stayed outside because otherwise it will just impregnate the whole house.

You’ll get the smell of diesel all the way through the house. And you can see people when they come in, ‘oh, what is that?’ ‘Ah, that’s diesel.’