On the tube on the way home last night, a late middle aged inebriate started a conversation with me. 'Is that one of those iPads?' Self conscious that my wankiness had been named, I admitted that it was and tried to force the conversation towards an awkward silence. Not so lightly. 'I wanna know what she's reading' mumbled the man as he gestured towards a young lady sitting opposite us. The lady in question was leafing through a huge tome, a biography on Jean Rhys. My neighbour continued, 'I can tell that you like it, because you're making lots of tiny notes all over it. Must mean something to you'.
'Indeed it does' replied the lady softly, 'I'm writing my PHD on her'. What ensued was one of those brief, cordial but wholly unexpected conversations that are simultaneously unusual and pleasant. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the conversation about the work iPad was far less interesting. Of course I could have read about Jean Rhys on the old iPad, but who would have been able to tell that I wasn't just playing Angry Birds?
A couple of years ago a friend of mine wrote on the Picador publishing blog about the solidarity in seeing someone read the same book as you whilst traveling about in London, and yesterday's tube experience worried me that soon we will be stripped of that improbable connection, that in a couple of years, our eReaders and tablets will help us carry the anonymity or rehearsed personality of the internet to the signal free depths of the London underground.
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