The Landline's Final Call

I read a piece earlier this week about the ole landline becoming obsolete, another victim of digital media's relentless forward drive. I think the writer said he'd give it five years tops before the bell tolls for last call. Maybe less. Whenever it is I'll miss it when its gone because, apart from making me feel ancient, my memories of the ole blower are fond and I can think of worse yardsticks than it to measure my progress from boy to man. The first phone we got at home, a big beige coloured rotary dialler of a thing, would've arrived some time in the late seventies and I can remember even now those early incoming calls and the ominous air they would cast over the house as my father confronted the receiver as though it were some kind of poisonous snake before picking it up and suspiciously announcing our number, 429314, to whoever it was on the end of the line. And then would come the joy and relief when he'd discover that it wasn't MI5 but just another aunt or uncle or brother or mother on for no other reason than to say hello and congratulate us on having got the phone.

As I got older, my personal interest in that phone became more vested - mates would ring to furtively arrange clandestine underage pints and soon there were the voices of girlfriends on wanting to know whether I realised how saying what I'd said had made them feel how they felt! There were many long silences and slam dunks back in those days. As a student I often found myself on the other end of the line, nervously pressing 'Button A' on a beetle black pay-phone in the hallway of some forbidden flat or other before telling my mother that I wouldn't be home to face the music until the next day! Then the college days passed and the stakes were raised when my telephone manner became the difference between getting paid or getting fired.
But I think my rites of passage were complete when I got a place of my own which came with a touch tone phone of its own which in turn bequeathed me a number of my own denoting the fact I was now a man!

Then in 1998 the wires went and I went 088 with them and soon afterwards it was all digital in our digits. The people that rang the landline got fewer and fewer. And fewer. Now the only ones who ever call  are sellers or scammers or strangers. There is no air of anticipation anymore, that's all gone. All that's left is the air of inevitability that the ole bakelite's journey is nearly complete, that it's barely a twist of a dial away from the end of the line.

Land's end - another icon prepares for the skip.