When I was a child we had an operator connecting our telephone lines. We'd pick up the receiver of the black Bakelite handset and, miraculously, she'd speak: 'Number please?' Our phone numbers were a combination of alphabet letters and numbers and so short that forgetting one wasn't going to wash. My mother was convinced the operator was listening in to things that she shouldn't. Maybe it was a suspicious nature, but more likely a true understanding of how a small town works.
We lived in an old rambling house with a corridor of floor to ceiling cupboards. The corner one was set up as a phone booth, complete with a table and chair so you could settle in for a long 'mag' as my mother called it. One of her fortes was the long mag.
Needless to say, my relationship with the phone blossomed when I hit my teens. The corner cupboard was just the place to arrange a Saturday night date at the Empire Cinema and then phone girlfriends to revisit every detail of the making of the date. It wasn't exactly Pillow Talk, but I can remember a few relationships where there was more of a frisson over the phone line than in real life.
The phone experience began to change in the '60s and '70s when we graduated to an automatic exchange and colourful rotary dial handsets. The '80s were memorable for my infant son pulling a yellow model onto his head, which precipitated the first of a string of visits to the children's hospital. Then in the '90s a friend stumbled in my front door lugging a brick mobile Motorola and we just stood there in awe staring at it.
I love love love my iPhone but sometimes, I admit, I yearn for the privacy and secrecy of the corner cupboard and the thrill of not knowing where a conversation or a night at the cinema will lead.
