Hole in ozone layer as spraying son runs amok

WITH pocket money sent from well meaning relatives comes a degree of financial independence which does not always translate quite as smoothly from its theory of giving to the reality of spending as one might hope. I call it the Lynx Effect. Give a ten-year-old boy a bus fare, access to cash, and a trip into town with his mates, and you are asking for trouble.

Not the kind of trouble that involves coming home in the back of a police car — we are not there yet, although I remain confident that it is only a matter of time — but the kind of trouble that involves walking into his room the next day and straight into a eye-stinging, nostril-inflaming cloud of body spray that makes you rush for the nearest window to fling it open.

“Jog on, mother,” he says, when you suggest that the hole in the ozone layer now hovers directly above our house, as well as mobilising all the boy cats in the neighbourhood, attracted by the powerful scent emanating from number 137. He sprays and sprays, as you gag, hand clamped over mouth.

You have not spent a decade force feeding the little fecker organic carrots for all your hard work to be undone by a series of toxic squirts from a cheap can of body spray. Aside from the horrific cloud of smell, this stuff has the kind of ingredients you wouldn’t put in your lawnmower. Ingredients that without a degree in industrial chemistry, you can’t even pronounce, never mind spell.

“I need deodorant,” he says stubbornly, despite being years from malodorous puberty. The truth is far simpler — he needs to lose his aversion to washing (“But I had a bath on Tuesday”), yet such is the power of advertising that rather than smell clean, he would prefer to smell of polysyllabic parabens, cetyl alcohol and something misleadingly called parfum.

So you do what you always do in times of consumer crisis — march him to the wholefood supermarket to find a more natural alternative. This has worked in the past, when he came back from a sleepover demanding sugar coated double chocolate reconstituted sawdust clusters for breakfast — although this is not their brand name — and you managed to convince him that the carob and oat version was way cooler. Kids will believe anything when they are six.

But at ten, a certain jaundice has set in. As we stand before the rows of organic recycled aluminium-free roll-on deodorants made from extract of angel wing and distilled unicorn tears, and priced accordingly, the boy’s arms remain folded. “I want spray,” he says. “Roll-on is for grannies.” He means me.

We compromise. Or at least, I am led to believe that we are compromising, by his barely perceptible assent. We agree on a non-aerosol substance that smells terribly manly – tea tree, sandalwood, essence of lumberjack — and costs, drop for drop, about the same as Chanel No 5. Back home, it remains in his sports bag. Untouched.