Gentle fondness directed at First Great Western...

[kaberett]

... 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.)

Comments

[swaldman]

Oh, nice.

I have a minor love for FGW in that they run the only working galleys on normal-service trains in the country now. If you order a bacon sandwich for breakfast, the bacon is fried there and then - wheras if you do the same on Virgin a pre-made sandwich full of preservatives is put in a microwave. And on most other routes there isn't even that any more.

This isn't really a business decision by FGW, of course, but simply a leftover in their old rolling stock, a relic from the days of restaurant cars. I'm sure that it'll vanish in the future in favour of a higher seating density :-(

[milkymoon]

I'd prefer gorgeous scenery to massively hypocritical advertising that goes on about Real Beauty™ and feminist ideals while also being part of a company that sells products associated with sexist marketing, myself. D:

[sorrillia]

Trains!

Am sad I didn't get to ride more of them when I was there, nor the particular Cambridge-Manchester one you recommended because of unexpected rerouting.

[quirkytizzy]

I was so pleased with Dove's Real Beauty campaign...until someone pointed out that the same company owns Axe, which is RIFE with disgusting sexism. And it turns out the only reason they were being all "body positive" was because it would sell well.

Which made me think "Do the ends justify the motivation?" Yes, no, and a total clusterfuck of WHY CAN'T PEOPLE JUST BE DECENT FOR THE SAKE OF BEING DECENT, DAMNIT?!

[kaberett]

Yeah, Axe == Lynx. :-/

The other thing that's super-gross is that Unilever also own Fair & Lovely. Which... yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

[hairyears]

The 1903 out of Paddington has a proper silver-service Pullman Restaurant, run from that galley.

I'm something of a regular, on my trips to Darkest Somerset.

[swaldman]

Ooh, they still run a restaurant? Lovely. At least until they get new rolling stock.

-Simon, currently filled with dread from the news that Serco are taking over the franchise for the Caledonian Sleeper.