The Smell Of Christmas

The smell I most associate with Christmas is rubber.

It's exactly 25 years this Christmas that this aroma assaulted me upon opening the box that contained my 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Didn't have any games to play on it over the Christmas period so it was the Horizons tape (by Psion iirc) and some rudimentary attempts at using ZX Basic (and getting used to summoning the keywords via combinations of caps shift and symbol shift.)

Thankfully my geekier side was held in abeyance once the shops reopened and my parents took me to the Fuller shop in Sweeting Street, Liverpool - which was next to a shop selling "marital aids" (don't know why my almost 13 year old brain recorded that fact) and I left with Imagine's Arcadia and a crappy flight sim written in basic.