Ben Machell stands up for those that can't on the London Underground

Transport for London is about to trial a new badge for Tube passengers with hidden disabilities. It is blue and has ‘Please offer me a seat’ written on it. This is, on the one hand, a very good idea. And yet the very existence of this badge is already making me tense because… well… what if it doesn’t work? What if the trial ends in failure? When the mirror is held up to us as a city, what will we see? A nice, comfy seat ungrudgingly vacated? Or some City boy parked on his arse, pretending to be engrossed in his phone even though you can see that it’s actually run out of battery?

I’m anxious just thinking about it. The Tube has always encouraged an ice-cold callousness, as though every carriage were the very last spaceship leaving a doomed Earth. As a result, many years ago, I decided that I would be a conscientious objector in the endless war over seating, that I would never, ever, ever sit down on the Underground. I’m not exaggerating. I have not sat down on the Tube for a decade.

This is not me angling for an appearance on Esther Rantzen’s Hearts of Gold. If anything, it makes my life much easier. It eliminates the stress of wanting a seat, which I suppose is quite Zen really, proper Dalai Lama stuff. Plus, without wanting to sound even more arrogant, I know that I am fit and healthy. I back myself to be among the capital’s top 5 per cent of people most capable of standing up for a bit. In fact, given how many Londoners are obsessed with broadcasting the fact they’ve just done a Tough Mudder or triathlon, if someone developed an app that trumpeted how long you’ve spent standing on a tube every week there would be no need for blue badges at all.

And when my back is aching, I look at the healthy people all stubbornly sitting down and think to myself: ‘You’re Billy Zane. In Titanic. Sneaking on to a lifeboat with the women and children.’ I don’t want to be Billy Zane. I want to be Leo, going hypothermic so that Kate Winslet can lie down on a nice comfy piece of wood. And the best part is that, at the end, I don’t even die. I just hop off the carriage and carry on. It’s really not so bad.

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