#fumehead

My daughter is 8, and she doesn’t care about scent. She smells lovely and biscuity and her mother bans perfume. That’s probably a wise move: her mother knows, like her father does, that the beginning of scent in bottles is also the end of innocence. Shouldn’t there be a time in a person’s life before yearning? Shouldn’t there be days before the onset of doubt? Because where there is yearning there is always doubt. And maybe what we want for our children is a few years when their reality is uncomplicated, as perhaps it can never be for people beyond 16. 

—Andrew O’Hagan, from “Hope in a Bottle”