He found it odd that he seemed to have a distinctive flavour, although it was also a general flavour, the flavour of someone like himself. He remembered noting as a child when visiting relatives or school-friends that their houses always had a particular smell, and that it was the very smell of which they were oblivious. As he walked through the rooms or sat and drank a glass of orangeade in the kitchen he was struck by the way that the objects in their houses shared a special physiognomy, again something that belonged to these others as others. And after that it was immediately clear that his own house had a smell of which he was almost always unaware, and that his things had their own strange face, their own way of being exposed to happenstance which was not apparent to him in his life with them. It was at the level of taste and smell, and that pathos of physiognomy that identity was most keenly felt. Back then his own sensory identity would be most salient on returning home, especially after a holiday or a school camp, and now that it had become less tied to specific places and things this sense of a flavour remained linked to the idea of return, of returning to the self. It was sweet and bitter by turns, containing an immense nostalgia for animal life and an intimacy with mucky things and an inexorable reminder of the finiteness of life.