WAS it something I said?

There was a terrible silence.

Mrs H and Younger Daughter were looking at me without saying a word — wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

Like one of those cartoons where a whole room full of people shudders to a halt because someone has said the most inappropriate thing.

All I said was that I could understand the attraction of train spotting.

I should explain.

My father-in-law was telling me about his days watching the trains go by many years ago in Swindon.

He, his cousin and their mates would gather on the big iron bridge over the main railway line and watch the great express trains thunder by.

They could set their watches by the arrival of the Cornishman, or the Torbay Express, or any of the other great locos bearing the names of the express runs of the day.

They could hear them coming from miles away, and the drivers would see the lads up on the big iron bridge and give them an extra blast on the whistle or an extra rush of steam as they roared by.

The whole bridge would shake as they did.

At night, with weak lamps illuminating the station, they would see the great engines coming in the distance, the flames from their fireboxes illuminating the steam from below.

Then like great dragons, they would roar through the station on the express lines and be gone as quickly as they appeared.

I was gripped, and I wished I had been there at the time to see it. It was all about much more than collecting numbers, said my father-in-law. It was a whole experience, and it brought back vivid memories.

And all I said was that I could understand the attraction.

There was no need to look at me as if I had just confessed to a murder or booked a holiday at the same resort as the Redknapps.

The urge to spot things is almost exclusively a male thing.

Have you seen many women on railway stations noting down numbers? No, you haven't.

But blokes will jot down the numbers of pretty much anything that moves, then get home and cross them off in a book somewhere.

But they're not just numbers. They are snapshots in time.

Forty years ago we collected the names and numbers of the trains that brought the holidaymakers to Paignton. Then we crossed them off in a big orange hardback book full of lists of all the various different classes of engine.

We sat on the concrete wall down at the Sands Road end of the station and logged the Warship and Western class diesels that rolled into the station at regular intervals.

Later we would progress to carrying passengers' cases to buses and taxis for a few bob, but back then we were content to log the arrival of their trains.

Occasionally a Peak class or a Brush would arrive, but mainly they were snub-nosed Warships and hefty Westerns.

Some of the spotters began to take things further. Not me, I should add at this point, just in case you are viewing me in a very different light all of a sudden.

Before the multi-storey car park was built, there was a coach station in Garfield Road. On the same summer Saturdays that brought train-loads of holidaymakers to town for their weeks at Pontins or in local bed and breakfasts, coaches from all over the country would arrive.

Heavy clouds of grey dust hung in the air as coaches with exotic names like Ribble and Yelloway arrived and crunched across the gravel. Minibuses from the holiday camps were waiting for them, ready to whisk the passengers off to their chalets and weeks of 70s-style fun.

And there with their notebooks were the small boys of Paignton, or some of them, at least, jotting down the numbers of the arriving vehicles.

The urge to spot and record is strong.

If we had had an aerodrome in Torbay I'm sure we would have been jotting down aeroplane numbers.

But have things changed all that much?

It's just that today the spotting can be done from the comfort of your own armchair.

Take those ships on the horizon for instance. Tor Bay and Lyme Bay are hosts to a constantly changing panorama of shipping.

Plumes of smoke signal the arrival and departure of giant ships. Some of them just stay there waiting for someone to change the price of crude oil. They remind us that we are still part of a working port.

But what are they, where are they going and where have they come from?

Don't you want to know?

There are websites that can help.

Go to www.marinetraffic.com and you are a click away from ship-spotting heaven.

Each ship is a dot on the screen, which turns into an arrowhead when it moves. One click gives you the ship's name, size and destination.

If you felt the urge, you could write it all down in a notebook, and I have no doubt that there are people doing just that.

What about the aircraft overhead? Try www.airliners.net and you can see where they've been.

I even have a friend, who had better remain nameless for his own protection, who scans every lorry he sees on the motorway from a certain famous haulage company, because each one of them has a different girl's name on the front.

Actually, that is a bit sad.

But there is a romance to much of it and, as father-in-law says, that romance comes from the details that go behind the names and numbers.

The bald facts and figures are only like the black lines on a painting by numbers canvas before the real work has begun.

The enthusiasts put the colour in between the lines, people like Herald Express columnists Peter Gray and Bob Curtis.

In their hands it's not just a number scribbled down in the dead of night on the back of an envelope. It's a vivid picture of a snowy night at Newton Abbot, when the branch lines were blocked by a fresh fall of snow and nothing could get in or out of the town. Ask Peter Gray.

And it's not just a blip on a screen from a signal far out at sea. It's a whole little self-contained community moving across the ocean far from home. Ask Cap'n Bob.

And it's not just the word 'Pegasus' in my notebook. It's a summer Saturday in 1970 with bright sunshine, a blue locomotive with a yellow nose, my mates Nick, Ian and Adrian, a transistor radio playing 'Yellow River' by Christie, a green freezer pop from the shop in Sands Road, a cricket match starting in Queens Park behind us, dad stopping by on his way to the harbour and so on and so on.

It isn't just the numbers. It's what they represent.

I can tell I have not mounted the most robust defence of trainspotting.

I can just tell from the way you are looking at these words.

Don't ask me how.

I can just tell.

I'm sorry, spotters. I did my best for you.

But if you have ever looked at a plane, or a train, or the smoky plume of a ship which has just arrived from a far-off place or is about to set off for one, and said to yourself, 'I wonder...' then you're just a blink away from being a spotter yourself.