On the train one evening, I noticed...
She was using her smartphone with one hand and cuddling her young daughter with the other free arm. I marveled at how nimble her fingers were when tapping out messages on Facebook. They seemed to stretch to the very edges of the screen when seeking the right letter, and rarely seemed in error.
Her daughter, meanwhile, was playing avidly on an iPad - using a drawing app to reveal different sections of an image by rubbing her fingers over the glass. Every now and then she'd look up to see if her mum was watching before going back to the screen. Their attendance to each other seemed out of sync, it seemed to me.
She finished a message and smiled slightly at some imagined ghost on the other end, putting her phone back sharply in her handbag, as if to say she was all done with the phone and she'd now join everyone. Only a few minutes later, she reached in and pulled out the phone...
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