What are your favorite emojis?
If you’d asked me this question at fourteen, I wouldn’t still have understood it. Emojis didn’t exist. But I did have a visual language—stitched, traded, worn, and blatantly expressed on the backs of my bell-bottom jeans or the lower, mud gathering swing of my flares.
They were called splash patches, though there was nothing aquatic about them. Mind came from the Kard Bar, Handyside Arcade, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, The UK, Europe —half Aladdin’s cave, half identity workshop—where Bowie posters leaned against bar mirrors and racks of badges and patches offered you the chance to become someone slightly more interesting than you currently were.
There was, as I remember it, an unspoken rule: you had to have your favourite splash patch on your bum. Otherwise, patches were stitched on below the knee, where they could be seen as you walked, turned, hovered. Jackets too, and tote bags—portable canvases. But the placement mattered. It always does. You put splash patches where they could be seen (or discovered by the intrepid lover).
I was four years too young for the true Woodstock crowd. I knew that. But patches were a way in—an apprenticeship in belonging to that era. It was dressing up and my older sister had it all: kaftan, bags covered in tasles, waistcoats and army surplus French coats.
You didn’t need to be the thing yet; you could signal towards it. A smiley face, a peace sign, something cryptic or ironic—stitched onto denim, and suddenly you were part of a conversation that required no words.
They were bought, yes—but more importantly, they were given. Exchanged. A small gift. It wasn’t just decoration; it was endorsement. You can wear this. You’re one of us. Or at least: you might be.
Looking back now, fifty years on, I can see that those patches were my first experiments in self-definition. Not grand gestures. Not rebellion in any cinematic sense. You chose carefully. You placed them deliberately. You lived with the consequences.
And here’s the thing: I never really stopped.
Because when emojis arrived—those tiny digital hieroglyphs—I recognised the system immediately. Different medium, same instinct. A compressed language of identity, tone, affiliation.
But where others seem to scatter them liberally—strings of icons, faces, flames, celebrations—I find myself doing something else entirely. I’ve reduced my palette.
My favourite emojis?
🙂 👍 ☮️
That’s it.
The smiley face is the obvious inheritance. It hasn’t changed much in half a century. Still simple. Still ambiguous. Is it genuine? Is it ironic? Is it just enough? I like that uncertainty. I liked it then too.
The thumbs up is more functional. A signal of acknowledgement. Agreement without elaboration. In another life it might have been a nod across a room, or a glance that said, yes, that’ll do. It’s efficient. It doesn’t overplay its hand.
And the peace sign—the old CND symbol—feels like something deeper carried forward. It was there on patches, on badges, in the air even if we didn’t fully grasp its origins or implications at the time. Now, when I use it, it carries both meanings at once: the inherited idealism of youth, and the tempered understanding of age.
What I don’t do is decorate my messages endlessly. I don’t layer meaning upon meaning. Because I learnt early on that symbols lose their charge if overused. A patch meant something because it was chosen, placed, and lived with. The same is true now.
So my emojis are few. Deliberate. Placed where they’ll be seen—but not insisted upon.
In truth, I suspect I’m still that boy, standing in the Kard Bar, turning a patch over in my hand, wondering not just what it means, but what it will make me look like once I wear it.
And deciding—quietly, carefully—where I belong. My look was soon snatched up into a very different look – Punk! Followed by New Romantic which defined me for longer.
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