The game started when they were teenagers: what’s the worst place to take a selfie?

She sent the first one, a holiday snap from Ground Zero. In reply, that winter, came a duckfaced pout from a memorial service, taken as the other mourners prayed. They kept going as they grew older, even though they rarely met up. Bad taste pictures were their way of staying in touch.

A black-dress cleavage shot from her mother’s wake. An inappropriate wink beside ambulances at a car crash. Two dozen shots in a fluorescent hospital corridor, looking for a flattering angle while waiting to learn if her daughter would be OK.

She took the last one at her friend’s graveside, and sent it anyway.

Background

This is a piece from my recent collection, Memetic Infection Hazards, which contained 25 pieces in descending order of size. This one is just 120 words.

People have got into trouble for taking selfies in inappropriate locations. John Higgs has written about how, for some people, a selfie is an affirmation of presence and survival, not vanity. The problem comes with the context collapse of the Internet, when an image gets copied beyond the circle of people who understand or are sympathetic to it.

Recommendations

My friend Jonny Fluffypunk recommended The Subterraneans podcast. It took me a while to get into, but I’ve listened to three seasons of this in the last week. It’s a series of weird and creepy psychogeographical explorations of London. The stories are well told, with a worrying plausibility. It sometimes hard to spot exactly when the inventions come in.

My favourite episodes so far:

• Billionaire’s Row - “In the wealthy suburbs of Kensington and Hampstead, billionaires are building super-basements to artificially extend their properties an extra five or six storeys below the ground... but that's not all they're doing.”

• Nuclear Apocalypse - “Nuclear war, plague, and learning to fly at the end of the world.”

• Citronella - “somewhere on the Internet there is a perfect copy of you”