A nostalgic experiment mixes perfume, letters and old snacks to step back into a 1990 Worthing teenager’s world.
In April 1990, the day I turned eighteen, the house on the Worthing-Brighton road thrummed with dozens of wooden clocks. Every room counted seconds, and the hallway echoed with a chorus of misaligned hands. The town – often called “God’s waiting room” – stretched along the south coast, its low-rise bungalows and misty sea mirroring the relentless ticking.
Time felt unavoidable, yet as a teenager I believed love, poetry and fashion were the only masters worth obeying. Decades later, I tried to retrieve that vanished feeling. No real-time machine exists, so I assembled a kit of sensory cues: a bottle of Christian Dior’s Poison eau de Cologne, a stash of 1990-era Salt & Vinegar Discos letters that never left my desk, and a half-finished copy of a poetry booklet.
With those items I set out on a personal voyage back to the dawn of the 90s.
The scent of memory and the brain’s thalamus
“Most sensory inputs go first to an area of the brain called the thalamus” explains Catherine Loveday, a memory-research professor and podcast host.
She adds that olfactory signals travel directly to memory centres, bypassing many filters. Spraying Poison onto my wrist, I inhaled a blend of plum, tuberose and spice, letting the aroma act as a shortcut into my teenage mind. The scent sparked a rush of confidence – “dramatic, strong, sweet, potent” – the very emotions that coloured my eighteenth-year choices.
Retracing the 60-mile route from London to Worthing
Driving the 60 miles from London to Worthing, I noted changes that the 2024 general election had already written into the town’s fabric. Worthing West, once a safe Conservative seat, elected its first Labour MP that year, a shift partly influenced by nearby Brighton’s edgier politics. The latest census recorded an average resident age of 44, a few years older than the town’s population when I left home.
The familiar yellow façade of my childhood home still stands, though its wooden gates have turned grey and the property has been out of my family’s possession for 22 years. The old phone box at the end of the lane, a silent witness to private calls, has vanished, replaced by the ubiquitous pocket-sized phone that I deliberately ignore to honor the 1990 mindset.
Even the Lloyds bank tower I passed daily has been converted into apartments; its giant digital clock was removed a decade ago after it froze at 00:00. Nearby, the former newsagent is now a quiet storefront, while the butcher’s shop retains its award-winning sausages, a culinary anchor from my youth.
Re-living the rituals of an 18-year-old
Back in the town, I sought out the small details that defined my teenage world. The local bakery now serves pastries instead of the simple buns I once bought for a quick snack. I purchased a pack of Salt & Vinegar Discos – still as aggressively tangy as I remembered – and recalled a study by Utkarsh Gupta (University of North Dakota) linking multisensory integration to “mental time travel.” The crisp’s intensity seemed to awaken the same neural pathways Catherine described.
Walking the familiar route to my former sixth-form college, my feet instinctively chose the crosswalks I once navigated without headphones or GPS. Ivy wrapped the chain-link fence, and discarded litter tangled in weeds, each sight triggering a vivid flash of a 1990 classroom: Italian library tapes, poetry drafts titled “Moon Lady” and “Balloons,” and a coveted Saturday job at Volume One bookshop. I remembered ordering slim poetry volumes from San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, sending a few dollars overseas and waiting six weeks for the packages to arrive.
Academically, I recall the pressure of A-level essays – “Why did race relations become an issue in British politics after 1945?” and “Is Mr Darcy’s change credible, or do we believe it because we want to?” – and the simultaneous anxiety about losing virginity, a cultural milestone I felt compelled to meet before turning 19.
Love, friendship and the paradox of memory
The boy I called C, a year older and already slated for Cambridge, offered feedback on my essays. He told me, “It’s not as important as Chaplin, as Dylan, Ginsberg, the Beatles, football, love, life, sex and death.” Our late-night conversations, guitar sessions and shy glances across my pink duvet formed a collage of first-love intensity. Decades later, he admits that memories of that period are “pretty vague because they’re essentially quite positive and didn’t really serve survival.”
My best friend D, the partner in countless Saturday-night pub crawls, still appears in my mind as the person who once laid a red-paper-cloth-covered table for my eighteenth birthday dinner. We shared salty peanuts, black-lace novels, and a bottle of Southern Comfort mixed with lemonade – a drink I now order on Amazon to re-create the feeling.
Even the subtle shifts in daily life stand out: the disappearance of the phone box, the new apartment conversion of the Lloyds tower, the re-branding of the local bakery into a patisserie, and the continuity of the butcher’s award-winning sausages. These contrasts feel like looking through bifocals – the old and the new coexisting.
Through scent, taste, and the physical act of walking familiar streets, I managed to summon a fragment of the teenager who once believed that love, books, and a splash of perfume could stave off any looming crisis – be it a prison riot, a poll-tax protest, or the looming end of the Cold War. The experiment proves that while we cannot truly travel back in time, the brain’s sensory pathways let us retrieve enough fragments to feel, for a fleeting moment, that we are eighteen again.
