Although I smoked regularly, I only smoked around five a day, and I simply assumed my poor ability to smell was something that was part of me, like having a terrible sense of humour.

During all those years it never occurred to me that smoking was the reason for my blunted sense of smell, even though I knew both taste and smell could be affected.

It took a vast pulmonary embolism – generated by a seven-hour operation – to make me stop. The thought of puffing smoke anywhere near a life-threatening blood clot in my lungs held little appeal, and as soon as I was out of hospital, I chucked out my lighters, cigarettes, rolling tobacco and Rizlas. That was it. The end.

We smell through olfactory nerves which travel from both the nose and the roof of the mouth (making taste a close connection to smell) on to the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotion, memory and mood. That’s why smells are so evocative.

For example, I have a very strong memory of my father’s skin – sweet, warm and distinctive – but no sense, from about my late 30s, of what other men’s skin smelled like, including that of my ex-husband and my current partner. I’ve read about falling in love with a person’s smell but I can’t say I’ve ever had that experience.

Yes, I could smell a small amount. I suppose I suffered from what’s known as ‘hyposmia’, a reduced sense of smell. For example, I enjoyed the woodsmoke of Diptyque’s Feu de Bois candle as much as the next person (well maybe not quite as much) and hated the stench of the kitchen after cooking fish.

It’s hard to know when the sense was lost, or at least severely limited, because like so many things in life, I didn’t ‘get’ what I didn’t have until it came back. All I knew was that others frequently commented on smells around them, but I’d never really understand what they meant.