After a week of concentrated screen staring I escaped from Pictures of the Year 2007 to a nearby food court for dinner with my wife Andrea. We go there often as it is very close to our apartment and offers all kinds of tasty food. Normally we arrive around 2000 because by then everything has slowed down a bit and it is much easier to get a table at our favourite places.

This time as we sat outside drinking a beer, two couples arrived with babies and took the table next to us. They ordered food, fed their babies and chatted until their food arrived, then one mother opened up her laptop. I thought it rather strange that she’d should want to check her e-mails while she was eating until she moved the two highchairs together and stuck the laptop in front of the kids who can’t have been much more than a year old. 

I was so happy to have escaped my screen for the time being, I couldn’t help but feel slightly sorry for these poor little guys stuck in front of theirs, although the distraction it provided certainly gave their parents time to eat in peace and who knows, maybe maybe next time we see them they’ll be casually slipping “neigh, oink, baa, ruff, cluck, meow” into the after dinner conversation.