I usually try to eschew sentimentality in all its forms � I have recently come to believe that the greatest clash between my mother�s personality and my own is that she injects everything with a dose of sentimentality, while I try and remove it � but for a moment this morning I became extremely sentimental.

About what, you ask?

The smell of a sausage roll warming in a pie warmer.

I was in the 7-11 buying my regular morning diet coke (yeah, that cutting down thing really isn�t working) when the rich pastry smell of an actively warming sausage roll suddenly sent me straight back to the school tuck shop.

Although there was a tuck shop at all four schools I attended, it�s the one from my final high school to which I was returned this morning. Perhaps because it was fully enclosed so that the smell of the sausage rolls and meat pies in the pie warmer was stronger than in any of the other tuck shops where you had to line up outside (sometimes in the rain) to purchase lollies, chips and other evil goodies.

Though, funnily enough, the enclosed tuck shop allowed only the most limited diet of sugary evils. It�s entire inventory consisted of sausage rolls, pies, pasties (aka the tuck shop staples), Mars Bars, Milky Ways and milk. No chips, no lollies, none of those triangular Sunny Boy ice blocks.

But it was the appeal of a hot sausage roll in a paper bag soggy with tomato sauce that kept dragging me back anyway. Something about a hot lunch on a winter day, rather than a round of sandwiches or whatever else it was I ate for school lunches normally (which, now that I think about it, I can�t really recall at all, so can�t have included anything vaguely spectacular). The fact it was a treat. The crispy pastry smell.

This morning when I got a whiff of that pastry it might have sent me straight back to school, but it didn�t send me scrambling to buy a sausage roll for lunch. I haven�t done that for over five years. Mainly because the older I get the less the taste lives up to the smell. Most of the time they�re way too dry from spending all those hours in the pie warmer.

But until five years ago I could still be occasionally tempted by the smell enough to forget that the taste wouldn�t be so good. Until one afternoon when I�d had to work through lunch and go searching for something to eat in the food wasteland that is 2-4pm in this city. This led me to be tempted by the smell of the pie warmer and I scoffed a large sausage roll that I knew at the time should have been just a little warmer. I knew some hours later that it should have gone straight in the bin.

I ended up with the worst case of food poisoning that I�ve ever had. Complete with hours upon hours of vomiting, an injection in the bum to stop the vomiting, and follow-up tablets to make sure the vomiting didn�t come back.

But I�m pleased that while I�m unlikely to ever want to eat another sausage roll from a pie warmer, my food poisoning experience didn�t take away the simple pleasure that the smell brings.

Perhaps that�s why I got a little sentimental this morning � I know that those tuck shop days are something I can never go back to, on so many levels. And it�s okay to be a little sentimental or nostalgic about that, right?

So long as no one tells my mother.