Train

A few years ago, I didn't notice most of the mums and dads and kids around me. Now I seem to see them everywhere. I suppose this isn't surprising, really.

The other day, I had to go up to London on the train. I was sitting reading a newspaper and the train stopped at Haslemere, or it may have been Godalming. A family got on board: mum, dad, girl of about 7, boy of about 5. The woman caught my attention. Her face had a hard look, but she'd covered it under a layer of quite skillfully-applied make-up. Her hair was blond and arranged in a neat, recently-cut bob. She wore a black, wool coat and tight, shiny knee-length boots. The overall message seemed to be: "I may be a mother, but that doesn't make me a lost cause."

She plonked the kids in a pair of seats and sat across the aisle opposite her husband. He opened his green and red 'I'm a hiker' rucksack and pulled out two smaller cases. Each of the kids received one case, which they proceeded to open to reveal... portable DVD players. Up came the screens, out came the DVDs (Japanese anime), in popped the headphones. And that was that: the sum total of the parents' interaction with their children. I couldn't help myself from staring at them. It says a great deal about the mother and the father that they didn't seem to notice that the were being stared at almost all the way to London.

The children didn't speak to each other. The parents didn't speak to the children. The parents hardly even spoke to themselves. The woman pulled out a magazine from a handbag. The man got stuck into a paperback.

I suppose in a way I shouldn't find cause for complaint in this scenario. At least they weren't being loud or obnoxious or disruptive or rude. But in a way, that's what made the whole thing worse. The entire 40-odd minute trip to London was a lost opportunity. The parents could've interacted with the kids in so many ways. They could've pointed out the sights the train went past. They could've talked about what they were going to do when they reached their destination. They could have read a book together. If they absolutely had to watch a DVD, at least they could've watched the same one together. But no: the family trip was obviously meant to be conducted by four individuals who happened to be in the same family. Each person in their own cell and a cell for each person... a rechargeable cell at that, with Bluetooth headphones and wifi Internet access.

And then I think about myself and wonder if I would've been any different if I still had Jessica. It's easy for me to stare from a distance and pontificate, but I'm sure one of the main reasons why I feel the way I do at the moment is because I have experienced loss.

If Jessica had lived until she was 5 or 7, and Martin and I had decided to take her up to the Natural History Museum or the V&A, who's to say that I wouldn't have bought her a portable DVD player or a Nintendo DS or an iPod just to keep her 'happy' (ie quiet)?

One of my colleagues at work is the father of a two-year-old boy and the other day he was telling all of us how pleased he was that he'd managed to teach the boy to use the DVD player in his room.

"This way," he explained, "he doesn't have to wake us up on a Sunday morning. If he gets up before we do, he can stick his Thomas The Tank Engine DVD on by himself and so Cathy and I get to have a bit of a lie in."

Everybody laughed, but afterwards, in the loos, there were several muttered grumblings: "I'd like to see what THAT boy's going to be like as a teenager..."

Haven't parents always tried to find clever ways of keeping their children occupied? Colouring books, musical instruments, puzzles, physical games... But then I suppose the 'technology' which was needed for those activities wasn't quite so incisive. It didn't cut off all interaction between the person carrying out the activity and the parent/guardian/cousin/sibling/friend.

I can see I'm slipping into 21st century cliches now. Maybe in a few years' time babies will have Bluetooth headsets implanted into their skin at the same time as they get their measles injections. And maybe some scientists will work out that baby talk is actually a complex language and babies will use their headsets to communicate with each other - telepathy-style - and there won't be any need for them to learn languages like English or French and, within a couple of generations, the planet will be overrun by baby-talk-babbling, wired-up adults sitting still in their individual rooms in their individual houses.

I think next time I go on the train, I need to take my own MP3 player with me, shut my eyes and listen to my music.

That's if I ever listen to music again.