Is that me on the See it. Say it. Sorted poster?

Everyone thinks the man in the image is me, even my own mother. So I decided to investigate

In 2012, biochemists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that children’s cells, shed in utero, can go on living in the brains of their mothers for several decades. The study’s authors couldn’t definitively say why, or explain what such cells do, exactly, but the news reminded me of my childhood paranoia that my mum was secretly able to read my mind. (Were microchimeric cells… psychic transmitters?) As pre-adolescent neuroses go, I suppose this one came from a good place. My nine-year-old self felt so close to her that even telepathy didn’t seem out of the question. I trusted that mother knew best – and knew me best.

More recently, I was accompanying her through Arsenal station in north London when she stopped at one of those “See it. Say it. Sorted” posters. “I am sure that this is you,” she announced, staring at the grainy, black-and-white image. This particular variant showed a Japanese-looking dude in a scarf and jacket, peering up from a newspaper at a suspiciously abandoned bag. I’d seen it many times before. The image had been in use since November 2016, when the Department for Transport launched it as part of a series encouraging members of the public to report “anything that doesn’t look right” to staff or police. The campaign’s stated aim was to establish “a more vigilant network on railways across the country” – a priority at a time when the UK’s terrorism threat level was “severe”, meaning that an attack was considered “highly likely”. The various posters in the series have since appeared in about 11,000 locations, while the Ronseal-blunt slogan – “See it. Say it. Sorted” – has been broadcast on more than 13,000 trains.

When the poster first went up eight years ago, a friend texted me a photo of it and asked, “IS THIS YOU?!?” I was pretty sure that it wasn’t. I wore the same sort of glasses as the Man in the Picture, the same sort of scarf, the same sort of jacket. After a fresh cut, my hair looked a bit like his. But I hadn’t posed for a campaign shoot, at least knowingly. By which I mean: one lunchtime, a year or two before the slogan became a fact of British life, a photographer had asked to take a picture of me near Farringdon station. I’d said yes, assuming that it was for a small, local project, and signed a release form. But was this that photo? Surely I’d have been properly informed about the purpose of the shoot if it was for something as consequential as a national anti-terror campaign?

I was sceptical. My mother, though, was convinced that it was me. She pointed at the nose of the Man in the Picture, his mouth, his shoulders. “I will always recognise my own son,” she said, somewhat profoundly, her secret brain-stash of my microchimeric cells possibly glowing.

Later, I decided to find out once and for all whether that picture was of me. I contacted the British Transport Police, whose logo is prominently displayed on the bottom-right corner of every poster – but a representative informed me that the force had nothing to do with the campaign, which was the responsibility of the Department for Transport. So I sent the latter a freedom-of-information request, only to be fobbed off again. “Following a thorough search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by this department,” replied the policy adviser who had been forced to deal with my weird queries. The communications agency AML, which designed the posters, ignored me completely.

So I’m still uncertain, which bothers me. The friend who first alerted me to the poster’s existence doesn’t see why I’m increasingly perturbed by my possible participation in the campaign. “You’re the one saving the day in that poster – you spot a bomb!” she said the other day. Yet I can’t help but feel that its fundamental premise – that we are all at risk of being murdered by one of our fellow travellers, and that this is an unavoidable reality of 21st-century life – serves the sinister interests of a political class that has for too long been at ease pursuing foreign policies that inflame tensions across the globe, increasing the odds of a mid-commute massacre. A world in which a potential terror attack is as ordinary as yet another signal failure shouldn’t be accepted as normal, and neither should paranoia be our civic duty. If security is the rationale for the existence of a state and the justification for its authority over its subjects, why don’t I feel secure?

Perhaps telepathically sensing my distress, my mum calls. I’m glad. Surely she would understand? (For context: her last message on the family WhatsApp read, apropos of nothing, “I hate Elon Musk.”) I answer the phone and inform her of my lack of progress with the Department for Transport, and all the rest. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t think that’s you in the poster, after all. How’s my grandson?”