Walking AND Talking? Phone Nostalgia! (‘Life’s a Journey’ Nostalgia Link-Up, Week 58)

Welcome to year two of our weekly series of ‘link-up’ Posts which reflect on life’s journey, old memories and family stories (see below for more info).

There are few things in my life which have actually got smaller as I have grown older.

Praise be to the almighty then for the telephone.

The biggest of all was 8 feet high and bright red. Always requiring 10p and usually smelling of piss.

My first memories of our home phone are of learning to answer it. My mother insisted on a secretarial greeting (no great surprise given that she was a secretary) which required me to announce the last 4 digits of the phone number that the caller had just rung. What was that all about then?

Learning to make outbound calls required considerably more patience for the following reasons:-

1. It was necessary to leave the comfort of one’s armchair and travel to the location of the static instrument in order to make a call

2. One was required to untangle the yards of curly, plastic coated wire which attached the handset to the phone’s base before beginning

3. It took a full five minutes to dial anyone’s number, since the rotating dial provided a full forefinger workout, the likes of which has never been matched in the years that followed

It wasn’t long before this old lady looked cumbersome. Bring on the ‘Trimphone’. Always wall-hung if you were any kind of cool. And buttons. That you could PUSH!

And then the wires disappeared. Yeah baby. A white ‘brick’ with a large antenna which allowed you to WALK around without the inevitable yank-back when you reached the extremities of the wire. Don’t go in the garden, though. It ain’t all that.

Top that, thought I. So they did. A portable phone. That you can use outside. Mind. Officially. Blown. Shame about the suitcase. And the fact that there was only one other bloke in the UK who you could call.

And so it continued. We had the Flip phone, the answerphone, the digital phone, the car phone and the iPhone. Exhausting.

And where are we now? Retro ‘rocks’, apparently. Oh well, what goes around, comes around I suppose.

It’s a small piece of kit, but I’m willing to bet you sat next to it for a considerable number of teenage hours. Share your memories of your first phone or just a phone related story if you like. Spill the beans in a blog post and add your posts on the Linky below, or just leave a comment. It truly makes all the difference.

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