‘We’ll never forget the magic of a landline’, Viv Groskop wrote in The Guardian on Friday in a nostalgic article mourning the passing of the traditional telephone. It got me thinking about my relationship with the old fashioned landline. (Not that we ever called it that in the days before the mobile phone took over.)

During my 1970s childhood, our household phone sat on a table in the hall of our Cardiff house. That, and the cost, tended to keep calls short. As a 10 year old I’d developed a curious habit of answering calls with an awkward announcement: “Cardiff 755183, who’s speaking please?” On reflection, this was curious – why repeat a number that the person on the other end had just dialled? And they were about to tell me their identity.

As Groskop points out, we memorised numbers in those days. I still remember my aunt’s number: Cardiff 756796, even though I haven’t dialled that number for over 35 years. You can see my own first home phone in the 1989 photo of my Teddington flat at the top of this post. My number? 01 977 9115. (London’s old 01 code was so iconic that ITV named its London events show 01 for London.)

My London number (by then including the new 081 outer London code) even appeared on Nationwide Building Society news releases as an evening contact number in that pre-mobile era. Yet I cannot tell you my son’s mobile number, no doubt because there’s no need to memorise numbers now we just click on a contact name.

Yet I did have one curious teenage experience when my memory for a phone number went awry. During my O levels in 1980, I called my sister in Wiltshire. I couldn’t understand why I’d got that painful number unobtainable ring tone for a number I called every week. I tried again – only to realise I’d used my four digit WJEC candidate number instead of the Swindon code. One memory had temporarily overwritten another.

Back in the 1990s I’d have long conversations with friends on the phone, before one of us would call a halt by warning of the cost of the call. In time, we’d all sign up to BT’s Family and Friends scheme which offered discounted calls to a handful of numbers. It paid to work out whose number to honour in this way – your most frequently dialled number may not have been the most expensive to call.

Searching for a phone box

When I went to university in 1982, I suddenly became dependent on the street phone box. The traditional Giles Gilbert Scott kiosk was a design classic, but standing searching for one with a working phone was a dispiriting experience on a bitterly cold East Midlands winter night. When I found one, I’d usually discover someone already inside, in mid call. After 10 minutes, it was tempting to sigh loudly, or even tap on the door to ask how much longer they’d be. Yet when I finally got in and put in my 2p coins I had no idea if my the person I was calling was actually at home. If I was calling home, I’d give my Mum the phone number of the box, and wait for her to call me back. I remember a curious tone like birdsong for a few seconds when we were reconnected.

Student accommodation rarely had a phone, so we had to communicate in other ways. One exam season I sent a letter to my friends Kate and Helen to try to arrange to meet up (their student hovel was a few miles away from mine) and thinking even then there must be better ways to communicate! These days, we arrange our reunions by Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

When I graduated, I took photos of the phone boxes I’d spent so much time in over the past few years. Another world…

999!

When our son Owen was very little, we got a call one Sunday morning asking if all was well. It was the 999 operator, who explained that someone had dialled the emergency number from our phone. It was obviously Owen, playing with the keypad. We hid the landline in the airing cupboard to prevent it happening again. A few years later this caused a panic when I was about to appear live on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 show. I’d been reassured that a cordless phone was fine, but just before going on air I was told it had to be a fixed line. I just had time to retrieve the old handset from its hiding place before the interview began. I recalled this panic in a letter to The Times in 2022.

By 2020 the only person I’d speak to on the home phone was my father, for a Sunday evening catch up. Dad would also sometimes call for advice on tech matters, announcing himself when I answered, ‘It’s Dad’. Yet after the pandemic struck we switched to Zoom calls, as he found it easier to hear me there than on the phone. We Zoomed as he lay in a Cardiff hospital bed with Covid in October 2020, and four months later we worked together via Zoom turning his Bob the Blogger web diary into a Kindle book, Pandemic! My care home diary. I was thrilled by the way my then 94 year old father was adapting to new technology – not for the first time!

Back in 1978, Blondie’s song Hanging on the Telephone reached number 5 in the British charts. The lyrics evoke that long-gone era in which making phone calls was an often frustrating experience, as I found in my student years. The irony is that today, when we carry a phone with us everywhere, the last thing we’re likely to do is to call someone on it!