Dettol.

Popcorn makes people think of the movies.

Coconut makes people think of the beach.

Dettol Makes me think of skinned knees and the woods in Surrey England.

I Was Born In a hospital in London England on the morning of October 28th 1983. Once I was fit to leave I was taken home to our cottage in a town south of London close to the south shore of England called Reigate Surrey.

Represented Here By a small red dot.

This was the type of town that just cant exist anymore. It was small, subtle, quaint, centered around community and local business. Most shops were owned by familys within the area. Pharmacists and tobaconists and grocery stores and all the kinds of places that usually are owned by conglomorates were owned by friendly shop keepers. I think this is probably where the original seed of doubt in big business for me started because of course eventually Reigate did fall victim (albeit to a far lesser degree than most towns in the modernized world) to corporate interest and low low prices.

Here is the High Street (Main Street)

I would spend the majority of my days walking around the woods in our back yard. Depending on the time of year It seemed that I would always have different walking partners. My brothers usually only in the winter because they were bored of being indoors, my sister in the summer because she only enjoyed the outdoors when it was nice, my mother in the fall because she loved seeing the leaves change and my father whenever he found the time or was home.
The walk through the woods wasnt short, it was a path that I would guess (and when I say guess it really is nothing more than JUST a guess...a childs perception of distance is no legal document) was about 2-4 miles depending on which trails you took. The one that left and returned to our back yard was the shortest but also my favorite because in the center of it, insanely enough, there was an old locomotive dining car. It was cherry red stained by years of exposure to the elements so every last crack had the weathering of something exquisetly made and worn in such a way that only the power of nature can accomplish. The metal railings were tinted brown and orange from the oxidation finally stripping away the hand polished guiderails and foot guards. The inside was deep cherry and oak woods that had somehow retained their elegance despite all the odds. My father would walk me through those woods and recount me story after story on those trails and in that locomotive car. He would improvise aboutgnomes and tree dwelling elves (I had never even heard of keebler at this point, so you can imagine how shocking it was when i really believed for a few years that keebler elves had stolen my fathers idea after we had moved to the states.) He would tell these stories with such passion and intense depth and hand movements. It was true joy to experience his genius of creation transposed to a seperate and completely silly medium such as childrens mystical story telling. He was damn good as far as I can remember. He should have written a book.

Here is a portion of those woods that we walked. I will try and find the locomotive at somepoint but im pretty sure it will take a lot of searching.

Thinking about those woods always makes me happy. Its like they are my power song. My Under Pressure. My Rise Above. Just this one thought of myself alone in those woods in england, rustling my stupid feet through those stupid leaves with a stomach full of ribena and smarties trying to remember and sometimes act out all those stories my dad told me, makes me warm inside in a way that i havent found in a long time. With no sarcasm I present to you the only word i can think of to represent it...YAY!

During these adventures I would often be throwing my pale little frail british body off of logs and up trees and down paths and would eventually scrape myself up. When it was bad (which it often was) I would run home and ask my mom to bandage me up. This was ALWAYS followed by a giant over-reaction on my mothers behalf on the severity of the wounds and would insist that i take a bath with a capful of dettol in it. Dettol is made by Reckitt & Coleman and is commercially available (Probably at those giant stores in reigate now) as an inexpensive liquid antiseptic which is safe and gentle enough to use on the skin (like in a bath) and powerful enough to also use as a disinfectant (for dog pee on kitchen floors). It is effective against bacteria, fungi, yeast, mildew and even the frightening "super-bug" It is able to kill 98% of microbes in just 15 seconds. So in other words, this shit is fucking unreal. Even grez started using it to prep his tattoos!
So now whenever I smell dettol, it doesnt remind me of dettol. It reminds me of my family in the woods, comfort when im hurt, a time in life when the hardest part of my day was deciding if I was going to be a wizard or a tree elf, and how much ribena I can fit in my belly. I love happiness. Why did I shun it for so long? Its all around when you just stop and smell the dettol.