The trailer for the third Bridget Jones film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, starring Renée Zellweger, has been aired, featuring love triangles, unsure baby parentage, cupcakes, power ballads and falling over in festival mud.

It’s pretty much what you would expect from one of Britain’s foremost fictional Everywomen – if, that is, it was still the 1990s. However, it’s 2016, and, whatever else the film has going for it, Bridget Jones can no longer claim to represent Everywoman.

Obviously, a comedy featuring Helen Fielding’s heroine does not have to be a gritty documentary about evolving social mores. However, just going by the trailer and looking at how things have changed in sexual/relationship terms, it all looks eerily dated in a bittersweet way – reminiscent of a lovely elderly lady recalling the larks she had as a land girl during the second world war.

The issue is that Bridget Jones is a true creature of the 1990s, and the 1990s not only seem a painfully long time ago, but painfully innocent, too.

A bygone age when all a single woman had to worry about were fags, weight gain, smug marrieds, and choosing between two men, both of whom had rather more to say for themselves than: “Netflix and chill?”

Fast forward to the present day, and even the uncertainty about the baby’s father would have Bridget ripped to shreds online – denounced as a conniving slut.

For her part, the original younger Bridget would have to navigate a new, murkier psychosexual marketplace, dealing with porn-addled, Tinder-addicted men, some of whom would swipe left and right until the end of time rather than consider any form of real commitment.

It’s not as though commitment-phobic men never existed before, but rather that they’re now being enabled to an unprecedented degree, as also are previously non-commitment phobic men, lured by the easily available sex. Add to this the culture of accessible desensitising ultra-extreme porn (Adam Johnson’s animal collection appeared to provoke more eye-rolls than real shock or disgust).

In my opinion, things haven’t been darker or nastier for unattached women in any period since the advent of female sexual liberation. Sure, some women might actually like it this way, and good for them.

However, I imagine that many others don’t. And to them I say: you’re not paranoid or sour – take it from me (an embittered ageing feminist crone), it definitely looks worse, more difficult to find a relationship, to form a family, than it’s ever been.

While there’s that hackneyed (fantastical?) old statistic about women being less likely to get married after 40 than being hit by a car, I would suggest that a fair few single women might sardonically observe that they’d prefer to be hit – not too forcefully – by a car rather than continue to grapple with the kind of sexual desperados they’re meeting online.

The lack of a partner has just been cited as the primary reason for the increasing numbers of women opting for egg freezing (a highly problematic process with no guarantee of success).

This is the new reality that the latest Bridget Jones appears to be missing, I guess, with its cupcakes, festival mud, hilarious baby scans and not one, but two, delighted would-be “fathers”. Where’s the 2016 sense of an all-enveloping trickiness and darkness surrounding modern romance? Of everything being so incredibly easy and yet so horribly difficult? Back in the 1990s, Bridget’s “knight on a white charger” fantasies were criticised and mocked, now it would seem that it’s actually Bridget’s nice, normal routine love and sex life that has become the stuff of unattainable fantasy.

Saul Bellow sat here. So this is a truly hot desk

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saul Bellow in 1982. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Saul Bellow’s son is having difficulty selling his late father’s writing desk, bought with the profits of the 1964 novel Herzog. The desk is going for $10,000 – which is, it seems, the asking price for any antique desk of its kind, even without added literary connections. But, as yet, there are no takers.

On the face of it, it’s depressing that no individual, or renowned university or museum, wishes to purchase the desk of a literary giant and Nobel laureate. However, some of the reasons given are of a surprisingly pragmatic nature. For instance, the University of Chicago said that, while it has Bellow’s papers, it’s trickier to store larger items such as desks. Thus does basic housekeeping trump art and sentiment.

This leaves me torn. On the one hand, you can see the university’s point and even mildly applaud it: great authors aren’t theme parks, they don’t need to leave desks for posterity, not when they can leave their prose. However, I still can’t shake the feeling that Bellow is being snubbed in some way. Would it be too absurd to suggest that Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, et al, club together and buy the damn desk?

Brooklyn, focus on your education

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brooklyn Beckham in London this month. Photograph: Mark Robert Milan/GC Images

David Beckham has defended his son Brooklyn against charges of nepotism after he was hired to take the photographs for the next Burberry campaign. “Whether people believe it or not, he’s got talent,” said Beckham, proceeding to burble about teaching Brooklyn to have a sense of perspective about “things said about you, about us, that aren’t true”.

Oh behave. This isn’t another celebrity progeny modelling gig where all Brooklyn has to do is throw on some designer togs and pout his finest blue steel against an urban backdrop. This is a huge photography commission for a major brand, and Brooklyn is 17 years old. Precociously talented photographers of that age are usually embarking on A-level projects, not spearheading international advertising campaigns. This is beyond nepotism, into a whole new sphere of cringe. You could almost feel sorry for Brooklyn – he’s living in a celebrity bubble where being courted and indulged by the famous and powerful is a normal occurrence. The poor kid may even believe that answering his mobile and saying: “Um, yeah, I’ll do it” is real professional hustling.

Brooklyn needs his parents to put him straight, point out that Stella McCartney attended college to learn about fashion, and that David Bowie’s son, Duncan, quietly grafted for years before his film success. Of course, the Beckhams are allowed to love their children and be excited for their successes, just like everyone else. However, a responsible parent would have advised Brooklyn not to accept such a commission (however tempting), because it would be tainted, and to wait a few years, get some training and experience, then (and only then) go and set the world alight. The accusations about nepotism would always be there, but why make it so easy for those proffering them?