David Adams enjoys waiting at bus stations, airports and the like, quietly observing the great and diverse tide of humanity compelled to flow through them.
Once a fortnight, I have to catch a bus from Great Victoria Street station in Belfast to my home in Lisburn. With half an hour or so to spare, I frequently am an uninvited, if not wholly unintentional, witness to various little dramas involving fellow travellers.
Like a television reality show, it's only very occasionally that anything of actual significance happens. The perpetual soap opera of the bus station usually consists of little more than minor variations on a number of well-worn themes.
So familiar a sight are foreign tourists seeking directions and stressed-out parents struggling to manage unruly children that one barely notices any more.
While football supporters are regular passers-through, at 10.30 on a Friday morning they are usually sober and well behaved.
The occasional wino shuffling past is much too absorbed with his own daily concerns to bother anyone else. His personal dilemma consumes him. Far too early for him to have gathered together enough money for a drink, he dreads the prospect of his financial position remaining unchanged.
The only happenings of any note recently were the bleary-eyed and noisy passage through the station of a group of youngsters high on glue and, on a separate occasion, the mildly flattering attempt by a young gay man to pick me up.
I now keep an eagle eye out for the glue sniffers while, to avoid any further confusion, display as prominently as possible the wedding ring on my left hand.
But last week two disturbing incidents suddenly brought this little period of tranquillity to an abrupt end.
In the first, two young women with their three children (a toddler and two boys aged about seven) sat down beside me. From their conversation it was apparent they were embarking on a day's outing to Newcastle, Co Down. It was equally clear that, just as soon as they could off-load the boys at a play centre, the mothers (plus baby) intended spending a substantial part of the day in a local bar.
One of the boys, obviously excited at the prospect of a day out, began acting up a little. For a while he paid no attention to his mother's highly vocal and obscenity-strewn demands for him to settle down. Next thing, his arm was almost yanked out of its socket as he was dragged within range of the open-handed slap she delivered with full force to the side of his head. Both families then set off in search of their bus, with the injured party, now joined in chorus by his baby sister screaming loudly. The other little boy, suitably cowed by what he had witnessed, trailed at a safe distance behind.
The second incident followed on almost immediately from the first. A taxi pulled up at the station and out of the back clambered a woman and her two young daughters. While the alpha male of the family remained motionless in the front passenger seat, the driver, mother and two little girls wrestled suitcases and various travelling bags from the boot. Only when this task had been completed did the head of the family finally alight from the car. He carried with him two vital pieces of luggage he obviously didn't entrust to anyone else's care - a couple of cases of Harp lager.
These he lowered ever so gently (like a newborn baby into its cot) on to the platform beside the suitcases. Then, like a denim-clad Rottweiler, he stood guard over his precious cargo while barking expletive-riddled orders at his little family.
The last I saw of them, the driver of the Enniskillen Express was helping the mother put their suitcases into the rear of his vehicle while alpha male carefully positioned his carry-out among the other pieces of luggage.
"Parenting methods" such as these are far from uncommon in this modern age. And yet still we wonder why so many youngsters are out of control.
Teachers, working as they do on the front line every day, can readily point to where the root cause of the problem lies - in the home.
Launching attacks on ambulance crews, fire fighters and the police is now a recreational pastime for youngsters in many parts of Northern Ireland, while gangs of marauding children and young people continue to terrorise entire communities. With the parental role models many of these children have, the only surprise is that the situation isn't worse.
Despite our efforts to scapegoat everyone from teachers to police officers, and everything from lack of facilities to the fall-out from the Troubles, the simple fact is that too many parents are failing their children and, subsequently, the rest of us as well.
Those parents at Great Victoria Street could probably quote chapter and verse their many rights and entitlements; getting them to acknowledge their responsibilities would, I suspect, be quite another thing.
It's high time our rights-obsessed society began pointing up some of the responsibilities, as well as the benefits, that come with being a parent.