Phil Smith has something he'd like to get off his chest... take it away Phil!
Every night it happens. Not once but maybe half-a-dozen times. My wife and I sit there on the sofa, still and pale. Holding our breath. Waiting for it to stop. Waiting for it to pass, go down the road and afflict someone else, like the plague. It's that modern pestilence. The Telephone.
It is summary, rude and insufferably imperious. It delights in spoiling meals and ruining climaxes to dramas on TV. It elbows its way into life like the party boor who gatecrashes your conversation. And far from cementing relations, it sours them, "It'll be her again. You can kiss goodbye to the next hour of your life."
The relative who every night insists upon unravelling the numbing tedium of her day, spool by trivial spool. Or her from America whom you can't ignore because, well, it's America isn't it, and it's 3,000 miles away so it must be important. But it never is. It's that recipe for oatcake biscuits mother used to make. Billion dollar satellites hurtled into space. For what? Twelve ounces of fine oatmeal and a pinch of salt. The unsifted pabulum of mundane conversation. The idle chatter of dinnerladies.
You see, I come from an age when telephones weren't just toys. You had to be somebody to own one. When we used it, it was someone else's. It was for the panicked summmoning of doctors and tight-lipped exchanges with someone known as the Operator. It was located in draughty halls under dripping hat stands to discourage dalliance. The receiver was solemn and functional, black and upright like a hearse. Even today, if the phone rings after half-past nine at night I think someone's died.
The telephone saps the life-blood of your existence, time. We have a teenage son who settles down to it like a Roman emperor to a banquet. He reclines full length on the sofa or else the floor in the certainty that the conversation will last all night. When he can be persuaded to put the instrument down it is as hot as a lump of plutonium. And so am I. I am seething at the waste of time. The homework that remains undone. The self that remains unimproved. No wonder the phone is so popular with kids. It never asks them to spell their words or look up anything or defer to any higher source of understanding. it is as edifying as soaps, as demanding as pot noodles, as easy as sin. Mobile phones don't actually bake your brains, they painlessly replace them with hot air. No wonder we use the word 'chat'. A pale, listless word as empty as chaff.
The phone is a boon to the bore. A licence to drone. With none of the polite signs at your disposal - the steady glazing of the eyes as of a dying fish, the fretful glances in the direction of other business - the phone bore can on on and on until the listener's mind freezes over like the Hudson River. Hearing nothing from my wife's lips for a full ten minutes I have rushed into the room to phone the doctor only to find her mute, all will to live lost as some telephonic Ancient Mariner drones on at the other end of the line oblivious to the morphine of their own words. But we're too well brought up to say anything, to stem the slick of gelid words and shout, "Enough! Go away! We've lives to live. Important things to do before we settle the account. Before we're finally cut-off."
An answerphone isn't the answer. Because the persistent phone bore knows you're cowering there behind the crackly message, wincing at the excruciating sound of your own voice. They know it will be only a question of time before you're driven to picking it up!
And so we sit, hating it when it rings, dreading it when it doesn't because we know it soon will. Sometimes we take it off the hook. Unhook or else unhinged. But not for long. It might be something important. Someone may have died.
