As someone who likes badges (especially if they’re free) as well as the chirpy aesthetic of London Underground design and being pregnant after a fairly long haul, I was initially pleased with my baby-on-board badge. It’s an easy way to convey news, and wins you smiles from strangers on the street – and sometimes even a seat.
But as it’s become harder to heft myself about, I’ve found myself seeking to conceal it. People thinking I’m fat seems a small price to pay to avoid the worried looks and occasional outraged advocacy. For generally speaking, the badge is an inessential accessory. It’s hard enough to board the train, let alone near enough a seat for someone to see you. So the only people who clock it are those with whom you are squeezed against the doors. Your heavily flagged unhappiness only exacerbates theirs.
A new app seeks to address the problem. Install Babee on Board – it requires an iPhone, bluetooth, £3.99 and a heightened sense of social conscience – and you can either request or offer a seat. The logic, explained its creator, was that people were too engrossed in their phones to notice bumps waggling unhappily in front of their handbag.
But in fact, retreating into tech on the tube is not the problem. For most commuters, even those up the duff, it is the solution – the only feasible way of absenting yourself from a pretty hideous experience. The circumstances of commuting in rush hour are now grisly enough to mean not only that everyone needs a seat; they could also use six sessions of therapy and a gin and tonic.
Demanding special treatment, unless you’re actively incapacitated, feels increasingly silly. Phones are red herrings. Ditto unfriendliness. It is the system that needs fixing, fast.
When cake had taste
Of all the developments in the years since she was around – smartphones, self-driving cars, Brexit – I think the one that would have surprised my grandmother the most is the revolution in cake.
She and her friends may have spread margarine on their sandwiches with the heady abandon of those who remembered rationing, but baking was sacred. Cupcakes had not reared their big, piped heads. Instead delicate fairy cakes, accessorised with a small blob or a few silver balls, ruled supreme. Sponges had jam in the middle and icing dusted on top. They were not vehicles for diabetes.
For me, the main outrage about Donald Trump’s inauguration gateau is not that it’s an exact rip-off of the one made for Barack Obama, but that it’s a fat-clad skyscraper, ugly and garish, an embarrassment to the genre.
On the bus the other day I saw a woman happily tucking into a loaf of madeira, straight from the packet. One admired the lack of reliance on buttercream – and the lack of care about stares. But still, I wondered how it would have gone down in Ramsgate in 1992.
Modest talent
At the first screening of the Trainspotting sequel last week the director, Danny Boyle, described seeing cast members eye him on set from time to time, evidently thinking: “Danny, this better not be shite.” Introducing the movie, Boyle echoed their concern. At a time of awards-season bombast, such nerves are endearing. Now the Oscar nominations are out, we have six weeks until it’s all over for another year and we can start focusing on films about which we haven’t already been bombarded with buzz.
Top of my list, now that T2 Trainspotting has departed, is the first film from Matthew Holness – creator and star of cult sitcom Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which launched the careers of Alice Lowe and Richard Ayoade, and was set in pre-apocalyptic Romford.
Possum, a horror about a hand puppet, has just finished shooting in Norfolk. Holness describes it as “not remotely funny”. Amid the hyperbole and hoo-ha, self-deprecation can be the best sell.