Staying Alive – A Trip To The Osmothèque

For a moment, I wonder if the thing is going to leap out and attack me. Curled into the base of a steel box, it’s a tangle of what looks like fur, claws and hide. It could be a piece of a garish Halloween costume. Or the remnants of some very strange Biology experiment gone wrong. I stare at it for a moment. And then, reassured that it’s quite dead, I bring it closer to my nose and breathe in. The smell that fills me is complexity itself. Both clean and dirty, old and new, intimate and vast, it isn’t unlike the experience of sniffing the paws of a puppy or the back of a freshly-washed neck.