Some may be nostalgic for a time when the landline made communication a family affair, before smartphones were an extension of each of us
When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental.
But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.
I remember vividly the first time a girl called 14-year-old me at my family home on the landline. My mother answered the phone which sat on a bench in a book-lined downstairs room we reverentially called “the den” which included a special shelf for the White and Yellow Pages (remember them?). Mum gave this caller the third degree – who was she and what did she want? – before eventually summonsing me to the phone to name the “very forward” girl asking to speak to me.
Kill me now. Just the memory …
