Today I became nostalgic for a smell. You wake up on top of the covers in your underwear, and through the gloaming of your bedroom, through the smug pint of water, through the angst and exhaustion and joy and regret that comes from five hours in a nightclub and two hours on the wrong bus home, there is some bitter relief in the smell of smoke on your hair. That smell! Like barbecued teenagers and pepper and beer, almost lovely, pleasantly vile, a kind of lovebite memory, bruised on the throat in passion. That smell. It all seems quite mad now, the idea that people smoked, not just inside, but underground, in windowless rooms. Though I suppose so much seems mad to me about young fun still: come out, drink until you’re sick, it’ll be a laugh! Come out, get off with an ex you spent two years getting over! Come out, lose your phone! Come out, take two days to recover, tell everyone the wrong secrets! Come out, it will cost £100 and you’ll twist your ankle! Come out, it’ll be fun!
When I read the news that smoking was coming back, I thought: that smell. Then I thought: of course. The wellness era is truly at its end, celery water pooling under the door, hot yoga cooled down to a single tepid pilate. In a recent exchange with another artist, David Hockney wrote, “I too am BORED with WELLNESS. The concept seems ridiculous and too bossy for me, I’m still smoking, and ENJOYING it ENORMOUSLY.” His cigarette set off a fire alarm at the launch of his latest exhibition. These things go in cycles, don’t they, meaning the end of health signals the return of unhealth, and luxurious malaise, and celebrities like Lily-Rose Depp posing for paparazzi with a cigarette in her hand. Which was interesting because, as one photographer told the Guardian, for decades stars had asked him to delete any photos he took of them smoking – and today they’re deliberately lighting up.
I have never smoked. I tried, briefly in my teens, but found it fairly horrid, and I tend not to pursue horrid things, but I identified with the smokers who stuck at it, of course. The moody rebellion, the desire to escape, or quickly signpost the fact of your adulthood, all of that. I stood with them at lunchtime, a cancerous picket line. This, despite having spent my childhood on a long project to force my mother to give up smoking, one day replacing each of her cigarettes (hidden in a drawer) with artfully rolled up notes reminding her of death rates and the horrors of bad teeth. It worked, I won, she lives. As I entered adulthood, the world turned dramatically, until smoking was largely absent from public life. Pubs suddenly smelled of body odour and spilled drinks, in nightclubs you could suddenly see, far too clearly, exactly what romantic havoc you were wreaking. My hair once again smelled of Pantene, fewer people died.
But the problem with our major shift away from smoking was, while they could persuasively prove that it killed people, they were unable to convince anyone that cigarettes were not cool. This fact, I’m afraid, has come back to bite us. These photographs of celebrities with a fag in their mouth – they look sensational. Louche. Furious. Sultry. At parties now, young friends sneak a cheeky fag huddled outside in the last of the heat, and from here they appear to be transgressing obscenely, though later I learn they were only talking about books. It’s awful, of course. And people are wringing their hands over it across the internet: “Why?” the adults are asking, why has time turned round, why are our children sucking once again on the demon’s teat, and the answer, unfortunately, is: “Why not?”
This is a generation that was exposed to a rushing stream of increasingly alarming news about ecological destruction and the failures or disinterest of the adults in charge, the generation at the forefront of some of the world’s most traumatic events, appropriately anxious, overburdened with fears of the future, and perfectly within their rights to pick up a fag and say, “Fuck it.”
We, the elders, have handed doom down to our children like a bad watch and, after a brief foray into extreme health (which, let’s face it, was deeply unserious, proudly situating such things as “green juice” at its centre), these kids have succumbed to vice. The only way to direct young people away from cigarettes is for old people to reclaim them. To be photographed smoking intensely in their most comfortable tracksuits, unmoisturised and unthoughtful, complaining nasally about politics or the weather.
If you care about the safety of generation Z, you will stand outside in your slippers and chainsmoke a pack of cigarettes every morning, you will find the nearest impressionable 20-year-old and lean in with your morning breath as you offer them a nice fag, or cough wetly on a train. Light up, adults. We owe it to our children.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
