Babies and toddlers, the game is up – good people (adult people) aren’t putting up with your antisocial behaviour any more. Japan Airlines has developed an app with a child icon, showing passengers where small children, aged between eight days and two years, are sitting, thus enabling them to sit as far away as possible from the nappy-wearing sociopaths of the skies. Or something like that. Maybe there’s an argument for hyper-frequent flying business people using such an app, but what about the rest of us – people who occasionally fly for a few hours a time? Is it socially acceptable to hate babies now – leastways, to sit coldly prodding a child icon to banish them from your presence?
There’s something so intrinsically misanthropic about all this, I don’t know whether to laugh or ask for around-the-clock police surveillance on the people who use such icons. Certainly, it raises important ethical questions. Eight days, 24 months – how old is the child you’re prepared to vaporise from your flight experience? If there were an app to force young children to travel in a livestock cage in the cargo hold, would you use that too? Duct taping a kid’s mouth shut – where do you stand on that?
Most of us have had a bad experience with other people’s children on a plane – either the perma-bawling baby or a child kicking the back of your seat for three hours straight. Then again, many of us have also annoyed people with our own brats, not to mention being annoying ourselves. Where’s the “Smug Vegetarian Getting Her Specialist Meal First” app to eliminate me? Where’s “Reclines Seat for Entire Flight”, “Over-Chatty Stranger”, “Clambers Over You to Visit the Loo Three Times an Hour”, and the rest? Surely it’s human to be irritating in an aeroplane seat with limited leg room? And that’s sentient adults – children can’t help themselves.
If a baby screams on a plane, it’s because their ears hurt, the noise frightens them, they have colic or they’re just an evil baby, possessed by Lucifer. The operative word being “baby” – because whatever’s happening, the child can’t help it and the parents probably can’t stop it either. Maybe some of this grim infuriation taps into the ongoing cultural clash between old and new parenting styles – between old-school discipline and the more contemporary freestyling approach. At its worst this could turn into “I can’t tell Horatio to stop spraying you with his Frubes yoghurt in case it stunts his emotions.” But still, the vast majority of parents would be apologetic if their child disturbed you. If they’re not, again, that’s all about the parents, so maybe we need an app for them instead?
I understand why people would prefer to book child-free holidays, but is it extreme to wish them gone on the journey too? Where does in-flight comfort end and intolerance begin? Perhaps this situation doesn’t require an app – just a little public-spiritedness and some ear plugs.
Demi Moore excels in this new role as the nightmare ex
Forgive me, for I have sinned. I love how Demi Moore is being such a nightmare ex, slinging around revelations in her new memoir, Inside Out, especially all the stuff about her eight-year marriage to Ashton Kutcher. Maybe I’m enjoying it a bit too much, chiefly because when Moore and Kutcher split up there seemed to be just the slightest waft of condescension coming off him about how erratically the heartbroken Moore was behaving. I could be wrong (oh yes), but I just sensed an attitude that got a little too close to “Poor Demi. I’m still here for her. Even though she’s acting crazy, and everyone must agree that I’m totally right to leave her, right?”
Now it’s becoming clear why Moore might have been so “crazy”. By her telling (and only her telling, mind), Kutcher, 15 years her junior, wanted her to have threesomes, encouraged her to drink when she was highly dysfunctional around alcohol and then took a photo of her while hungover and vomiting, which he posted online. Another time, he took a photo of Moore in her knickers. How terribly gallant: is Disney missing a prince?
When Moore and Kutcher were together, they exemplified the saying “Better an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave”. Certainly, Kutcher (now happily married to Mila Kunis) appeared to have most of the power – excuse me, the Observer lawyers are waving ….
Who really knows what happens in a relationship between two lovely, famous people? However, seeing as Moore is cheerfully spilling the beans all over the pages of her book, I’d like to say good on her for fully embracing literary catharsis. Moore has played many roles in her life and now, here she is, excelling at another – all hail the nightmare ex.
Cut-and-paste speech is insult to casualties of Thomas Cook
Does the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, have an explanation for how sections of his announcement about the collapse of Thomas Cook appear to have been lifted from Chris Grayling’s 2017 speech about Monarch Airlines folding? It really is uncanny. In some places, all that has changed are names, dates and acronyms. It’s as though Shapps decided to use what Grayling said about Monarch with a few cheeky tweaks. But this couldn’t possibly have happened, could it? What kind of idle, slapdash minister would that make Shapps?
Shapps was previously sacked from the cabinet in 2015 when he finally admitted he had “over firmly” denied having a second job under a false name, hawking a get-rich-quick scheme. Now Shapps appears to be copying Grayling’s announcements. Is this a write-speech-quick scheme? If one is minded to be “over firm”, it also reveals telling amounts of contempt – the presumption being that people wouldn’t notice? If students plagiarised in this manner for essays, they would have their work disqualified – they might even be suspended or excluded. Moreover, this was about Thomas Cook going under, where people ended up stranded, and others face losing their jobs. These events deserve better than a government reaction that looks to be little more than a cut-and-paste job.
