WHAT IS THE BEST SMELL?

For our latest Big Question, we sniff the air and ask, what is the best smell? Six writers have followed their noses from homes to hedgerows and over the next two weeks we will be publishing their views. But now we want your choices too. 

Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, hunts down the delicate wild rose, its scent "a dreaming distillation of gardens, hedges and sunlight across the centuries." While the novelist Rose Tremain credits the smell of new-mown hay with her decision to become a writer, it was "so perfect, so life-affirming, that the idea of its inevitable transience (it was, after all, only the frail and final outbreath of a fallen crop) felt crushing...I couldn’t capture the smell; what I could capture was the power of my experience of the smell in words." 

Another novelist, Philip Pullman, picks frying bacon, "spitting with glee, letting the fat molecules...carry the news of the ongoing savoury-umami-salty-Maillard orgy to every corner of the house." 

Edward Carr, editorial director of Intelligent Life, chooses a second house-filling aroma, the smell of baking bread, "rising dough, tingling with the first hint of crust, and then a crescendo of deep, toasty notes filling the air as the loaf browns." 

We were surprised to discover that two of the writers we asked had lost their sense of smell, so called on memory. The Guardian columnist Ian Jack recalls an Indian train platform, ruefully concluding that "when a person can’t smell India he knows his nose is really in trouble." 

And finally, the poet Robin Robertson recalls the rain, "which is no smell at all but only a washing-away, a cleanness and yet another chance to start again." 

Which smell gets your vote? Have your say in our poll, below, and please let us know why you chose the smell that you did. Or, if you feel there's one that's just as beautiful and evocative, please let us know.