A wonderful sunny day in the park. I sat on a bench, was about to reach for my phone, but realized that the day was simply too beautiful and instead stared at the branches above. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a mother with her baby sat on the next bench along and I briefly glanced towards them before returning to slowly, gently breathing in the late spring.

I suppose I should have picked up on the sounds, but I admit that I didn’t. The child was communicating with its mother and the mother was responding with some sort of “ahm, yes, ahm”, more like an official who you happen to have disturbed in the middle of some important task. When I finally began paying attention and looked over at them, the child in the high pushchair was fighting with its hand, face and entire body for its mother’s attention. You know – smiles, frowns, pulling faces and getting upset. The mother responded, but somehow absently – that was what I first thought – with a kind of delay, almost wrongly. There was something odd about the scene and I didn’t understand exactly what until I stood up. Her crossed leg meant I hadn’t seen that the mother was not looking at the baby but at her phone, clearly engrossed in some deep exchange of messages or, judging by her twitching thumb, flicking through Instagram. Her reactions were a mixture of both (very many) responses to the screen and (very few) to her offspring.