Suzanne Harrington: Is this really the ideal time to join the Young Luddites?

Adult Kid One cannot conceive of a pre-Gen Z world, where people simply hung around, never quite knowing if the other person would turn up

Melting in the station shade, Adult Kid One and I allow our imaginations to run wild.

Waiting at a sleepy Provence station in the flattening August heat, the train bearing Adult Kid Two from Marseille glides to a halt. Scanning the straw-hatted passengers disembarking onto a white-hot platform, he is not amongst them. 

Yet only an hour earlier, he’d sent a WhatsApp — “on train, phone about to die”. He’s not on the next train either, or the one after that. In our era of hyper-connectivity, this disappearance assumes a mystery of Marie Celeste proportions.