Paul Hopkins: The girl on the train, noughts and crosses and not a phone or tablet in sight

I was on the train in Dublin the other month, on a journey of 35 minutes or so. It was choc-a-bloc with young people, being the Easter school holidays and all; the youngest accompanied by a parent or someone older, the older ones travelling alone or in groups of their contemporaries, all headed for the city for one reason or another.

All the young people, and I mean all – and, indeed, most of the adults on board – were engaged with their smartphones or tablets, tweeting and texting, oblivious to the world around them. Even those in company were so busy online that they were as solitary creatures in a sea of social media.

In the seat next to me was a woman, heavily pregnant and with a young girl, sitting opposite to my right. The young woman and child were engaged with each other. As I settled into my seat, the young girl looked up at this intruder, her grey-blue eyes lighting up, her mouth broadening to a wondrous smile.

We got talking, as you do, albeit briefly. Pleasantries.

They were mother and daughter, 11-year-old Katia. A sweet and engaging child. The mother was from Latvia, had been in Ireland 14 years, her daughter born here. The pair had been talking with each other in Latvian (or Lettish). When I put my spoke in, the girl’s English was impeccable.

I complimented her. Her mother proudly told me that her daughter was equally prolific in Russian and Irish, her schooling being as Gaeilge. The girl told me, her face lighting up again, that the expected baby was going to be a boy, that the doctor had said her brother was coming in June.

But all of this is not the main point of this column. The pertinent point is this: before I intruded into the company of Katia and her mother, the two had been engaged with each other, engrossed in a simple exercise that brought back memories of old. They were playing Hangman and Noughts & Crosses with each other, using a small white pad and a pink marker.

They were having great fun, and each time the girl outwitted her mother, well you’d swear she had been given all the tea in China.

No mobiles. No tablets. No texting or tweeting. Just a simple engagement between mother and daughter that spoke volumes.

Hangman? Noughts and Crosses?

When was the last time you saw any one playing such a simple game, a game that requires no expense and no technological gizmo?

Thought so.

It was my momentary alluding to their game, a game I had not seen played in roughly 50 years, that brought me into their conversation. “So much better that stuck to a mobile phone,” I said, thinking out loud and the mother said: “Oh, she is far too young.”

Katia nodded. “When I am a teenager,” she said.

“We’ll see,” her mother said. “We’ll see.”

And all this amid the ongoing debate about young people – children – and their phone access to questionable aspects of social media. Minister for Education Norma Foley has been back and forth with Met, Google and their ilk on ways of determining the age of someone going online. It's a debate at EU level also.

Most, if not all, of us are now dependent on the digital world for work and for leisure, the latter very much the prerogative of the young, as evidenced on my choc-a-bloc train.

Our quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools today, but wisdom, I would suggest, is found no more readily than it was 3,000 years ago in the court of King Solomon. Was my train choc-a-bloc with people over-bloated with information and starved of wisdom?

While I embrace the new technology, one of the things

that makes it harder and harder to connect with our wisdom is our increasing dependence on this smart technology. And I am as dependent on my iPhone as the next guy. Dare I say we seemingly have a pathological relationship with our devices, feeling not just addicted but trapped, finding it harder and harder to unplug and renew ourselves.

Maybe, though, if we switched them off for a day, an hour even, we might be pleasantly surprised.

For even if we didn’t exactly start talking to each other again, we might, at least, end up playing Noughts & Crosses.

Like the girl on the train...