The wordless Snapchat universe

I was sitting in a cafe with my daughter, Mia, and her friend last Sunday.  
Like all 16 year olds, they were discussing how awful their friends were, and of those awful friends, who did what to who at last night's party.
And like all mums allowed to go to a cafe with their 16 year old daughter,I tried to look 
"acceptably cool,'" by sitting quietly, drinking my coffee and pretending not to listen to their conversation.

Best coffee in Chichester, Attibassi

The strange thing about their chatter, though (making it very hard to keep track of when you are pretending not to listen ) was that it in the end, it didn't seem to involve using many words.
" You won't believe what they sent me from the party last night?" Mia was telling her friend, " this Snapchat, with a picture of two of them smiling, doing a thumbs up with the word PT underneath."
I was itching to ask what PT meant and desperate to explain that PT wasn't a word, but bit my tongue, repeating 
 " acceptably cool, acceptably cool," in my head.
" OMG," said Mia's friend ( "you could use the actual words," I wanted to say ).
" I know," said Mia, " it made me so angry. I mean why can't they just go to a party without having to tell the whole world how cra..they are." ( " I think you will find the  word is crazy," I want to say ).
Since Mia had seemed to include me in the last comment, I took my cue to speak.
" Perhaps they were just taking a photo because they were having a really good time and wanted to remember it?" I suggested weakly, feeling my comment taper off into a question under the fierce gaze of incredulity that Mia and her friend turned on me.
" If they wanted to do that they wouldn't have done it as a Snapchat would they?" said Mia, " it disappears after like 20 seconds. And why would they be smile-pouting if it was because they were having such a good time. "
Cowed into silence at this logic, I carried on pretending not to listen.
" I know what we need to do," shouted Mia gleefully to her friend, " we need to Snapchat them exactly the same picture from here, you and me with our thumbs up, just like their photo and write AB underneath ( Attibassi is the name of the cafe we were in, best coffee in Chichester! ). 

Attibassi, coolest hangout in Chichester

Enthusiastically they set to work.
Posed, clicked and sent.
 Two girls, thumbs up, the gold and black Attibassi wallpaper in the background.
There was a few minutes of expectant silence and then Mia's phone buzzed.
" Look," groaned Mia, showing the phone to her friend and me." i knew that would happen. Now everyone is going to be bitching about me all weekend.I knew she'd be angry.  Why doesn't she get that  it was just a joke."
" How can you tell she's angry?" I dared to ask, looking at the photo before it disappeared:
A tired girl, lips arching downwards making a weary thumbs-up.
Mia gave me another one of her withering looks.
" Obviously she's angry.  Look at her."
But before I could look anymore, the picture was gone.
The trouble with conversations without words, is that they are constantly open to misunderstanding … .and understanding each other is hard enough, even when we are talking. 
But where's the fun in words when you can spend the whole day misinterpreting pictures!

"I know what we can do," said Mia," we can go to all the shops in town and take the same photo in all of them…."
"Yeah," said her friend excitedly, " we could go to Top Shop,take the photo and put TS underneath."
" Or just take a photo of everyone around you Snapchatting and write BS underneath," I suggested..
Fortunately, Mia and her friend didn't hear me. They were too busy trying to get their smile-pouting poses exactly right.
Hugging my hands around my steaming cup of coffee, I glanced around the cafe. 
Sitting comfortably on the red, leather sofas or perched on high stools in front of the floor to ceiling windows, almost everyone was holding their phones up in front of them, taking perfectly posed pictures. 
 Dads with their kids, so that without words, they could show the world what  perfect dads they are.
Mums holding glasses of steaming coffee: "look at me," the image would say, " even though I'm a busy mum, I'm still so trendy, I have time to drink coffee from a  glass."
Teenagers leaning their heads together, hair gleaming or time-consumingly sculpted, perfect smiles on their perfect faces " look at the fun we are having while we are young and beautiful," the image would say.

" We've got to go now mum," Mia said, " Thanks for the coffee ( Nutella Mocha ) 
" Yeah, thanks for the hot chocolate," said her friend ( a whole bar of Montezuma chocolate melted in frothy milk) " it was delicious. Where shall we Snapchat first Mia?"
I watched them drift youthfully out of the cafe, feeling grateful that for now, at least, they were still using words instead of temporary photos to communicate with each other.

Perhaps I am just a conservative purist but I have struggled with text speak.
I find the LOL's and sos's and cra's and wht tme?s hard to take. 
Our 14 year old son, who has never been particularly interested in spelling things correctly, no longer needs to try. With his 30,000 followers on Twitter, spelling correctly is obviously a thing of the past.  The important thing is to say everything in as few characters as possible,so vowels are definitely a complete waste of space.
But even textspeak must be better than the "no speak," of Snapchat or Instagram.

I finished my coffee, carefully hid my very old-fashioned phone ( only letters and numbers, no camera ) in the deepest pocket of my coat, paid and left.
And walking through the busy pre-Christmas streets of Chichester, I watched the wordless couples, staring down at their phones, the teenagers giggling as they shared photos. the kids pointing out the latest mobiles in shop windows to their parents who were busy sending Instagrams on their own.
And if anyone had snapchatted a photo of me just then, it would have shown a picture of a middle-aged woman wandering through a phone-filled world and the caption underneath would have read:
" Lost for words."