Worse than eggs

It was 1992, and Mum had arrived home with an exciting new piece of microwave cookware: an egg poacher that guaranteed perfectly poached eggs in only two and a half minutes. 

Keen to see the results, I hung about.

It's hard to say if those eggs were poached perfectly before the microwave burst open and scattered them in tiny pieces to the far corners of the house; they might have been. But one thing is certain: it was the worst thing I had ever smelled.

And it remained the worst thing I had ever smelled until, some twenty years later, I visited the boiling mud pools at Námafjall. Compared to Námafjall, those poached eggs smelled like fresh cut grass and summer night air, wood fire and orange blossom, fresh paint and butter in the pan.

The bowels of the earth smell much, much worse than eggs.