Abraham Lincoln was accosted by a woman on a bus, early in his career, who told him he was the ugliest man she had ever seen. “Yes, but what do you want me to do about it?” Lincoln said. “Well, you could stay home,” she replied. Sometimes, when Lincoln re-told the story, he was on a train, but the point is the same. Travelling by public transport opens you up to inconvenient encounters with other people.
Buses are ambiguous places. They are relatively cheap (at least they are in London, though not where I live). They offer a potential lifeline for teenagers. But they do involve these sometimes gritty interactions with people you wouldn’t usually meet.
Which is why the findings of the Millennium Cohort Study, tracking 13,000 British children born between 2000 and 2002, are striking: apparently, nearly half of 11-year-olds had never been on a bus. One in six also spends more than three hours a day in front of a screen, and the combination of the two – this bus-less, virtual world – was what concerned the Daily Mail.
It may indeed be a more solipsistic existence – but perhaps no more than the days when they spent three hours a day in front of television – and the fear of encounters with strangers which are more than inconvenient does seem to lead to a withdrawal of children from the real world. The National Trust’s campaign 50 Things to Do Before You Are 11¾, recognises this problem.
There are actually two kinds of bus. There’s the life-enhancing kind, often the smaller ones, where the driver is helpful, friendly and involved, helping people on and off. I encountered a driver in Sussex last week who stopped the bus and phoned a colleague coming towards him just to help an older lady who had strayed too far the wrong way.
The other kind is not life-enhancing, because the drivers are tightly controlled and their managers don’t allow them to do anything like that, so they are effectively mechanical adjuncts to their buses. I wouldn’t wish those on 11-year-olds. (There is also a third kind. The peculiar Boris exhibition buses in central London where there is an under-employed conductor staring out of the window wondering what to do – but that is by the way.)
The truth is that most buses provide a glimpse of other, less convenient worlds, of the zero-hour contractors travelling to work before dawn. Or the exhausted working mothers pushing their buggies home from the child-minders. Chance encounters allow us to break down stereotypes and see the world as it really is – although they can have the reverse effect too.
That’s the thing about geographical communities. They have inconvenient neighbours in them, which is why they are more useful than the much-hyped virtual communities, which can be self-reinforcing in comparison. And like buses, geographical communities are open to serendipity. They are places where you can see life, overhear conversations, watch behaviour, usually – though not always – in relative safety, and not be in control. That’s what makes buses good for the soul, and also rather suspect for parents. But the whole implication of the Daily Mail’s report is that children have disappeared into a virtual world, and are losing their grip on reality.
Well, I’m not convinced about this, as there is very little evidence one way or another. The American philosopher Robert Nozick, sadly no longer with us, suggested a reason why we should worry less. In a virtual world, he said, we will long for reality even more. Despite our collective obsession with the virtual world, it does seem to have provided us with a paradoxical antennae to distinguish between real and fake. We increasingly patrol the border between the two, longing for live performance or real food, and being shocked when pop idols lip sync their performances.
So, let’s not worry too much about our grip on reality, which seems to me to be growing. But we do need safe places where people can experience the inconvenience of the real world. Politicians certainly do, but so do the rest of us, and especially children.
After all, the acid test of authenticity is whether it is possible to tell the truth to a future president travelling on an omnibus.
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