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Here I was thinking it was only me! Yet according to what I’ve read, psychologists believe there are as many as three million of us who have hang-ups about ’phone calls. We ‘phonophobics’ hate such things with abhorrence. My aversion is rooted in the fact that I was well into my eighth year before making a call. As a family, we didn’t possess a telephone before. Instead, we had a ’phone box at the end of the road. We associated it with the police, the ambulance and suchlike heart-stopping services. I’m talking, of course, of the time when telephones were a rarity, and the ’phone directory contained a page of handy hints like, ‘First, lift the receiver from its cradle...!’
When my parents first had a ’phone, it was treated rather like an intruder. It was installed in a draughty entrance hall, with its jangling bell frightening even the most senile throughout the house. No question then of it being ‘good to talk’, as it is today. And trunk calls, in an age when ringing through to the next town meant going via the operator, were forbidden – unless it was a matter of life or death. These days, it’s some pesky female from India or other, telling about bank charges or I’m receiving a free holiday for my delight!
But time marches on... and so does technology, unfortunately. Nowadays you see people who literally can’t keep off the telephone – why they do it, I don’t know. On the train, in the car, out on the street, they babble on as if life would come to an end if they stopped talking.
For myself, I can live without this ringing monstrosity. If I sound like a demented crosspatch, I respond by saying that the telephone is the most intrusive device ever invented -and, frequently, an impertinent one at that.
I realize that the telephone must come as a boon to many, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a ruddy nuisance! Give me, rather, some words from the Apocrypha which say, ‘Be brief, say much in a few words, like a man who knows and can still hold his tongue.’
Phonophobics, like me, would hasten to agree.
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