kaberett | Gentle fondness directed at First Great Western... (Reply)

... who are the folk who run the Paddington-to-Penzance line, which is my favourite rail journey in the country (it loses out to a couple of Family Traditional Favourites in the Alps for Favourite In The World, but some of you may recall some time ago me posting in delight that my mother had, at 1am the night before, written me an e-mail on the comparative history of railway engineering in Cornwall and Austria in the 1800s...), because currently they are running a series of ads - in the tube and on the big electronic billboards along the bit of the A4 that's my above-ground route to work - that involve showing me enormous pictures of the Clifton bridge and St Michael's Mount and so on and so forth.

I find it enormously soothing and enormously restful, and is certainly a damn sight better than the previous ad series run in that spot, which was by Selfridges - "#beautyproject", or somesuch, which while it did contain a token dude and a token black lady and a token old lady... well, they were all thin, and every single time I saw one I ended up quietly singing:

and Dove may say it's campaigning for 'real beauty'
but Dove is owned by Unilever, who also own Lynx
and we're familiar with the women in the Lynx adverts
they're examples of what we expect of women on TV
skinny, young, objectified and silent
we're drowning in the beauty myth
we're trapped within deceit

(ONSIND, If You Feel Attacked By Feminism It's Probably A Counter-Attack, and I am just going to take this opportunity again to note how much I adore this band.)